Content Security Policy

W3C Candidate Recommendation, 3 September 2014

This version:
http://www.w3.org/TR/2014/CR-CSP2-2-20140903/
Latest version:
http://www.w3c.org/TR/CSP2/
Editor’s Draft:
https://w3c.github.io/webappsec/specs/content-security-policy/
Previous Versions:
http://www.w3.org/TR/2014/WD-CSP2-20140703/
http://www.w3.org/TR/2014/WD-CSP11-20140211/
http://www.w3.org/TR/2012/CR-CSP-20121115/
Feedback:
public-webappsec@w3.org with subject line “[CSP2] … message topic …”(archives)
Editors:
(Google Inc.)
(Google Inc.)
(Mozilla Corporation)
Former Editors:
(formerly of Mozilla Corporation)

Abstract

This document defines a policy language used to declare a set of content restrictions for a web resource, and a mechanism for transmitting the policy from a server to a client where the policy is enforced.

Status of this document

This section describes the status of this document at the time of its publication. Other documents may supersede this document. A list of current W3C publications and the latest revision of this technical report can be found in the W3C technical reports index at http://www.w3.org/TR/.

This document was published by the Web Application Security Working Group as a Candidate Recommendation. This document is intended to become a W3C Recommendation.

The (archived) public mailing list public-webappsec@w3.org (see instructions) is preferred for discussion of this specification. When sending e-mail, please put the text “CSP2” in the subject, preferably like this: “[CSP2] …summary of comment…

Publication as a Candidate Recommendation does not imply endorsement by the W3C Membership. This is a draft document and may be updated, replaced or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to cite this document as other than work in progress.

The entrance criteria for this document to enter the Proposed Recommendation stage is to have a minimum of two independent and interoperable user agents that implementation all the features of this specification, which will be determined by passing the user agent tests defined in the test suite developed by the Working Group.

This document was produced by a group operating under the 5 February 2004 W3C Patent Policy. W3C maintains a public list of any patent disclosures made in connection with the deliverables of the group; that page also includes instructions for disclosing a patent. An individual who has actual knowledge of a patent which the individual believes contains Essential Claim(s) must disclose the information in accordance with section 6 of the W3C Patent Policy.

This document is governed by the 1 August 2014 W3C Process Document.

The following features are at-risk, and may be dropped during the CR period:

Table of Contents

1 Introduction

This section is not normative.

This document defines Content Security Policy, a mechanism web applications can use to mitigate a broad class of content injection vulnerabilities, such as cross-site scripting (XSS). Content Security Policy is a declarative policy that lets the authors (or server administrators) of a web application inform the client about the sources from which the application expects to load resources.

To mitigate XSS attacks, for example, a web application can declare that it only expects to load script from specific, trusted sources. This declaration allows the client to detect and block malicious scripts injected into the application by an attacker.

Content Security Policy (CSP) is not intended as a first line of defense against content injection vulnerabilities. Instead, CSP is best used as defense-in-depth, to reduce the harm caused by content injection attacks. As a first line of defense against content injection, server operators should validate their input and encode their output.

There is often a non-trivial amount of work required to apply CSP to an existing web application. To reap the greatest benefit, authors will need to move all inline script and style out-of-line, for example into external scripts, because the user agent cannot determine whether an inline script was injected by an attacker.

To take advantage of CSP, a web application opts into using CSP by supplying a Content-Security-Policy HTTP header. Such policies apply to the current resource representation only. To supply a policy for an entire site, the server needs to supply a policy with each resource representation.

1.1 Changes from 1.0

This document describes an evolution of the Content Security Policy specification. Level 2 makes two breaking changes, and adds support for a number of new directives and capabilities which are summarized below:

  1. The following changes are backwards incompatible with the majority of user agent’s implementations of CSP 1:
    1. The path component of a source expression is now ignored if the resource being loaded is the result of a redirect, as described in §4.2.2.3 Paths and Redirects.

      Note: Paths are technically new in CSP2, but they were already implemented in many user agents before this revision of CSP was completed, so noting the change here seems reasonable.

    2. Redirects are blocked by default, and explicitly allowed with a new unsafe-redirect expression.
    3. A protected resource’s ability to load Workers is now controlled via child-src rather than script-src.
    4. Workers now have their own policy, separate from the protected resource which loaded them. This is described in §5.1 Workers.
  2. The following directives are brand new in this revision:
    1. base-uri controls the protected resource’s ability to specify the document base URL.
    2. child-src deprecates and replaces frame-src, controlling the protected resource’s ability to embed frames, and to load Workers.
    3. form-action controls the protected resource’s ability to submit forms.
    4. frame-ancestors controls the protected resource’s ability be embedded in other documents. It is meant to supplant the X-Frame-Options HTTP request header.
    5. plugin-types controls the protected resource’s ability to load specific types of plugins.
    6. referrer controls the protected resource’s referrer policy [REFERRER].
    7. reflected-xss controls the user agent’s built-in heuristics to actively protect against XSS. It is meant to supplant the X-XSS-Protection HTTP request header.
  3. Individual inline scripts and stylesheets may be whitelisted via nonces (as described in §4.2.4 Valid Nonces) and hashes (as described in §4.2.5 Valid Hashes).
  4. A CSP request header is now sent with relevant requests, as described in §3.4 The CSP HTTP Request Header.
  5. A SecurityPolicyViolationEvent is fired upon violations, as described in §6.3 Firing Violation Events.
  6. A number of new fields were added to violation reports (both those POSTED via report-uri, and those handed to the DOM via SecurityPolicyViolationEvent events. These include effectiveDirective, statusCode, sourceFile, lineNumber, columnNumber.

2 Key Concepts and Terminology

This section defines several terms used throughout the document.

The term security policy refers to either:

  1. a set of security preferences for restrictions within which the content can operate, or
  2. a fragment of text that codifies these preferences.

The security policies defined by this document are applied by a user agent on a per-resource representation basis. Specifically, when a user agent receives a policy along with the representation of a given resource, that policy applies to that resource representation only. This document often refers to that resource representation as the protected resource.

A security policy directive is a portion of a policy that declares the specific set of restrictions for a particular resource type, or which manipulates a specific aspect of a protected resource’s configuration. A server transmits its security policy for a particular protected resource as a collection of directives, such as default-src 'self', each of which declares a specific set of restrictions for that resource as instantiated by the user agent. More details are provided in the §7 Directives section.

A directive consists of a directive name, which indicates the privileges controlled by the directive, and a directive value, which specifies the restrictions the policy imposes on those privileges.

The term origin is defined in the Origin specification. [RFC6454]

The term globally unique identifier is defined in section 4 of the Origin specification. Note that URLs that do not use hierarchical elements as naming authorities have origins which are globally unique identifiers. [RFC6454]

The term URI is defined in the URI specification. [URI]

The term resource representation is defined Section 3 of HTTP/1.1 -- Semantics and Content [RFC7231]

The terms JSON object and JSON stringification are defined in the JSON specification. [RFC4627]

The applet, audio, embed, iframe, img, link, object, script, source, track, and video elements are defined in the HTML5 specification. [HTML5]

The terms auxiliary browsing contexts, opener browsing context, and nested browsing contexts are defined in the HTML5 specification. [HTML5]

A plugin is defined in the HTML5 specification. [HTML5]

The <@font-face> Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) rule is defined in the CSS Fonts Module Level 3 specification. [CSS3-FONTS]

The XMLHttpRequest object is defined in the XMLHttpRequest specification. [XMLHTTPREQUEST]

The WebSocket object is defined in the WebSocket specification. [WEBSOCKETS]

The EventSource object is defined in the EventSource specification. [EVENTSOURCE]

The Augmented Backus-Naur Form (ABNF) notation used in this document is specified in RFC5234. [ABNF]

This document also uses the ABNF extension "#rule" as defined in Section 7 of HTTP/1.1 -- Message Syntax and Routing. [RFC7230]

The following core rules are included by reference, as defined in Appendix B.1 of [ABNF]: ALPHA (letters), DIGIT (decimal 0-9), WSP (white space) and VCHAR (printing characters).

SHA-256, SHA-384, and SHA-512 are the digest algorithms defined by the NIST.

The runs a worker algorithm is defined in the Web Workers spec. [WORKERS]

The term callable refers to an object whose interface has one or more callers as defined in the Web IDL specification [WEBIDL].

An HTTP 200 response is defined in Section 6.3.1 of HTTP/1.1 -- Semantics and Content [RFC7231]

3 Policy Delivery

The server delivers the policy to the user agent via an HTTP response header or an HTML meta element. Servers are informed that requests are subject to a policy via an HTTP request header.

3.1 Content-Security-Policy Header Field

The Content-Security-Policy header field is the preferred mechanism for delivering a policy.

"Content-Security-Policy:" 1#policy-token

For example:

Content-Security-Policy: script-src 'self'

A server MAY send more than one HTTP header field named Content-Security-Policy with a given resource representation.

A server MAY send different Content-Security-Policy header field values with different representations of the same resource or with different resources.

Upon receiving an HTTP response containing at least one Content-Security-Policy header field, the user agent MUST enforce each of the policies contained in each such header field.

3.2 Content-Security-Policy-Report-Only Header Field

The Content-Security-Policy-Report-Only header field lets servers experiment with policies by monitoring (rather than enforcing) a policy.

"Content-Security-Policy-Report-Only:" 1#policy-token

For example, server operators might wish to develop their security policy iteratively. The operators can deploy a report-only policy based on their best estimate of how their site behaves:

Content-Security-Policy-Report-Only: script-src 'self'; report-uri /csp-report-endpoint/

If their site violates this policy the user agent will send violation reports to the URI specified in the policy’s report-uri directive, but allow the violating resources to load regardless. Once a site has confidence that the policy is appropriate, they can start enforcing the policy using the Content-Security-Policy header field.

A server MAY send more than one HTTP header field named Content-Security-Policy-Report-Only with a given resource representation.

A server MAY send different Content-Security-Policy-Report-Only header field values with different representations of the same resource or with different resources.

Upon receiving an HTTP response containing at least one Content-Security-Policy-Report-Only header field, the user agent MUST monitor each of the policies contained in each such header field.

Note: The Content-Security-Policy-Report-Only header is not supported inside a meta element.

3.3 HTML meta Element

The server MAY supply a policy in an HTML meta element with an http-equiv attribute that is a case insensitive match for the string "Content-Security-Policy". For example:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Security-Policy" content="script-src 'self'">
Add the following entry to the pragma directives for the meta element:
Content security policy (http-equiv="content-security-policy")
  1. If the Document’s head element is not an ancestor of the meta element, abort these steps.
  2. If the meta element lacks a content attribute, abort these steps.
  3. Let policy be the value of the content attribute of the meta element.
  4. Let directive-set be the result of parsing policy.
  5. Remove all occurrences of reflected-xss, report-uri, and sandbox directives from directive-set.
  6. Enforce each of the directives in directive-set, as defined for each directive type.

Authors are strongly encouraged to place the meta element as early in the document as possible to reduce the risk of content injection before a protective policy can be read and enforced.

Note: A policy specified via a meta element will be enforced along with any other policies active for the protected resource, regardless of where they’re specified. The general mechanism for determining the effect of enforcing multiple policies is detailed in the §3.5 Enforcing multiple policies. section.

Note: Modifications to the content attribute of a meta element after the element has been parsed will be ignored.

Note: The Content-Security-Policy-Report-Only header is not supported inside a meta element.

3.4 The CSP HTTP Request Header

The CSP header field indicates that a particular request is subject to a policy, and its value is defined by the following ABNF grammar:

"CSP:" 1#csp-header-value
csp-header-value = *WSP "active"

If the user agent is monitoring or enforcing a policy that includes directives whose value is a source list, and whose source list contains the 'unsafe-redirect' source expression, then the user agent MUST send a header field named CSP along with requests for resources whose origin does not match the protected resource’s origin. The value of this header MUST be active.

The user agent MAY choose to send this header only if the request is for a resource type which the active policy would effect. That is, given a policy of img-src example.com 'unsafe-redirect', the user agent would send CSP: active along with requests for images, but might choose not to send the header with requests for script.

Note: The central reason for including this header is that it hints to a server that information about redirects might be leaked as a side-effect of a page’s active policy. If this header is present, a server might decline to redirect a logged-out user from example.com to accounts.example.com, for example, as a malicious embedder might otherwise be able to determine the user’s logged-in status.

3.5 Enforcing multiple policies.

This section is not normative.

The above sections note that when multiple policies are present, each must be enforced or reported, according to its type. An example will help clarify how that ought to work in practice. The behavior of an XMLHttpRequest might seem unclear given a site that, for whatever reason, delivered the following HTTP headers:

Content-Security-Policy: default-src 'self' http://example.com http://example.net;
                         connect-src 'none';
Content-Security-Policy: connect-src http://example.com/;
                         script-src http://example.com/

Is a connection to example.com allowed or not? The short answer is that the connection is not allowed. Enforcing both policies means that a potential connection would have to pass through both unscathed. Even though the second policy would allow this connection, the first policy contains connect-src 'none', so its enforcement blocks the connection. The impact is that adding additional policies to the list of policies to enforce can only further restrict the capabilities of the protected resource.

To demonstrate that further, consider a script tag on this page. The first policy would lock scripts down to 'self', http://example.com and http://example.net via the default-src directive. The second, however, would only allow script from http://example.com/. Script will only load if it meets both policy’s criteria: in this case, the only origin that can match is http://example.com, as both policies allow it.

3.6 Policy applicability

This section is not normative.

Policies are associated with an protected resource, and enforced or monitored for that resource. If a resource does not create a new execution context (for example, when including a script, image, or stylesheet into a document), then any policies delivered with that resource are discarded without effect. Its execution is subject to the policy or policies of the including context. The following table outlines examples of these relationships:

Resource Type What policy applies?
Top-level Contexts HTML as a new, top-level browsing context The policy delivered with the resource
SVG, as a top-level document Policy delivered with the resource
Embedded Contexts Any resource included via iframe, object, or embed The policy of the embedding resource controls what may be embedded. The embedded resource, however, is controlled by the policy delivered with the resource, or the policy of the embedding resource if the embedded resource is a globally unique identifier (or a srcdoc frame).
SVG, as an embedded document The policy delivered with the resource, or policy of the creating context if created from a globally unique identifier.
JavaScript, as a Worker, Shared Worker or Service Worker The policy delivered with the resource, or policy of the creating context if created from a globally unique identifier
Subresources SVG, inlined via svg Policy of the including context
SVG, as a resource document Policy of the including context
HTML via XMLHttpRequest Policy of the context that performed the fetch
Image via img element Policy of the including context
JavaScript via a script element Policy of the including context
SVG, via img No policy; should be just as safe as JPG
SVG, as a WebFont No policy; should be just as safe as WOFF

4 Syntax and Algorithms

4.1 Policy Syntax

A Content Security Policy consists of a U+003B SEMICOLON (;) delimited list of directives. Each directive consists of a directive name and (optionally) a directive value, defined by the following ABNF:

policy-token    = [ directive-token *( ";" [ directive-token ] ) ]
directive-token = *WSP [ directive-name [ WSP directive-value ] ]
directive-name  = 1*( ALPHA / DIGIT / "-" )
directive-value = *( WSP / <VCHAR except ";" and ","> )

4.1.1 Parsing Policies

To parse the policy policy, the user agent MUST use an algorithm equivalent to the following:

  1. Let the set of directives be the empty set.
  2. For each non-empty token returned by strictly splitting the string policy on the character U+003B SEMICOLON (;):
    1. Skip whitespace.
    2. Collect a sequence of characters that are not space characters. The collected characters are the directive name.
    3. If there are characters remaining in token, skip ahead exactly one character (which must be a space character).
    4. The remaining characters in token (if any) are the directive value.
    5. If the set of directives already contains a directive whose name is a case insensitive match for directive name, ignore this instance of the directive and continue to the next token.
    6. Add a directive to the set of directives with name directive name and value directive value.
  3. Return the set of directives.

4.2 Source List Syntax

Many CSP directives use a value consisting of a source list, defined in the ABNF grammar below.

Each source expression in the source list represents a location from which content of the specified type can be retrieved. For example, the source expression 'none' represents the empty set of URIs, and the source expression 'unsafe-inline' represents content supplied inline in the resource itself.

source-list       = *WSP [ source-expression *( 1*WSP source-expression ) *WSP ]
                  / *WSP "'none'" *WSP
source-expression = scheme-source / host-source / keyword-source / nonce-source / hash-source
scheme-source     = scheme-part ":"
host-source       = [ scheme-part "://" ] host-part [ port-part ] [ path-part ]
keyword-source    = "'self'" / "'unsafe-inline'" / "'unsafe-eval'" / "'unsafe-redirect'"
base64-value      = 1*( ALPHA / DIGIT / "+" / "/" )*2( "=" )
nonce-value       = base64-value
hash-value        = base64-value
nonce-source      = "'nonce-" nonce-value "'"
hash-algo         = "sha256" / "sha384" / "sha512"
hash-source       = "'" hash-algo "-" hash-value "'"
scheme-part       = <scheme production from RFC 3986, section 3.1>
host-part         = "*" / [ "*." ] 1*host-char *( "." 1*host-char )
host-char         = ALPHA / DIGIT / "-"
path-part         = <path production from RFC 3986, section 3.3>
port-part         = ":" ( 1*DIGIT / "*" )

If the policy contains a nonce-source expression, the server MUST generate a fresh value for the nonce-value directive at random and independently each time it transmits a policy. This requirement ensures that the nonce-value is difficult for an attacker to predict.

The host-char production intentionally contains only ASCII characters; internationalized domain names cannot be entered directly into a policy string, but instead MUST be Punycode-encoded [RFC3492]. For example, the domain üüüüüü.de would be encoded as xn--tdaaaaaa.de.

4.2.1 Parsing Source Lists

To parse a source list source list, the user agent MUST use an algorithm equivalent to the following:

  1. Strip leading and trailing whitespace from source list.
  2. If source list is a case insensitive match for the string 'none' (including the quotation marks), return the empty set.
  3. Let set of source expressions be the empty set.
  4. For each token returned by splitting source list on spaces, if the token matches the grammar for source-expression, add the token to the set of source expressions.
  5. Return the set of source expressions.

Note: Characters like U+003B SEMICOLON (;) and U+002C COMMA (,) cannot appear in source expressions directly: if you’d like to include these characters in a source expression, they must be percent encoded as %3B and %2C respectively.

4.2.2 Matching Source Expressions

A URI is said to match a source expression if the following algorithm returns does match:

  1. Normalize the URI according to Section 6 of RFC3986.
  2. If the source expression a consists of a single U+002A ASTERISK character (*), and the URI’s scheme is not of a type designating a globally unique identifier, (such as blob:, data:, or filesystem:) then return does match.
  3. If the source expression matches the grammar for scheme-source:
    1. If the URI’s scheme is a case-insensitive match for the source expression’s scheme-part, return does match.
    2. Otherwise, return does not match.
  4. If the source expression matches the grammar for host-source:
    1. If the URI does not contain a host, then return does not match.
    2. Let uri-scheme, uri-host, and uri-port be the scheme, host, and port of the URI, respectively. If the URI does not have a port, then let uri-port be the default port for uri-scheme. Let uri-path be the path of the URI after decoding percent-encoded characters. If the URI does not have a path, then let uri-path be the U+002F SOLIDUS character (/).
    3. If the source expression has a scheme-part that is not a case insensitive match for uri-scheme, then return does not match.
    4. If the source expression does not have a scheme, return does not match if
      1. the scheme of the protected resource’s URI is a case insensitive match for HTTP, and uri-scheme is not a case insensitive match for either HTTP or HTTPS
      2. the scheme of the protected resource’s URI is not a case insensitive match for HTTP, and uri-scheme is not a case insensitive match for the scheme of the protected resource’s URI.
    5. If the first character of the source expression’s host-part is an U+002A ASTERISK character (*) and the remaining characters, including the leading U+002E FULL STOP character (.), are not a case insensitive match for the rightmost characters of uri-host, then return does not match.
    6. If the first character of the source expression’s host-part is not an U+002A ASTERISK character (*) and uri-host is not a case insensitive match for the source expression’s host-part, then return does not match.
    7. If the source expression does not contain a port-part and uri-port is not the default port for uri-scheme, then return does not match.
    8. If the source expression does contain a port-part, then return does not match if
      1. port-part does not contain an U+002A ASTERISK character (*), and
      2. port-part does not represent the same number as uri-port.
    9. If the source expression contains a non-empty path-part, and the URI is not the result of a redirect, then:
      1. Let decoded-path be the result of decoding path-part’s percent-encoded characters.
      2. If the final character of decoded-path is the U+002F SOLIDUS character (/), and decoded-path is not a prefix of uri-path, then return does not match.
      3. If the final character of decoded-path is not the U+002F SOLIDUS character (/), and decoded-path is not an exact match for uri-path then return does not match.
    10. Otherwise, return does match.
  5. If the source expression is a case insensitive match for 'self' (including the quotation marks), then:
    1. Return does match if the URI has the same scheme, host, and port as the protected resource’s URI (using the default port for the appropriate scheme if either or both URIs are missing ports).
  6. Otherwise, return does not match.

A URI is said to match a source list if the following conditions are met:

  1. The URI matches at least one source expression in the set of source expressions obtained by parsing the source list.
  2. At least one of the following is true:
    1. The URI is one of not the result of a redirect.
    2. The set of source expressions obtained by parsing the source list contains the source expression 'unsafe-redirect'.
    3. The source list is the U+002A ASTERISK character (*).

Note: No URIs match an empty set of source expressions, such as the set obtained by parsing the source list 'none'.

4.2.2.1 Security Considerations for GUID URI schemes

This section is not normative.

As defined above, special URI schemes that refer to specific pieces of unique content, such as "data:", "blob:" and "filesystem:" are excluded from matching a policy of * and must be explicitly listed. Policy authors should note that the content of such URIs is often derived from a response body or execution in a Document context, which may be unsafe. Especially for the default-src and script-src directives, policy authors should be aware that allowing "data:" URIs is equivalent to unsafe-inline and allowing "blob:" or "filesystem:" URIs is equivalent to unsafe-eval.

4.2.2.2 Path Matching

This section is not normative.

The rules for matching source expressions that contain paths are simpler than they look: paths that end with the '/' character match all files in a directory and its subdirectories. Paths that do not end with the '/' character match only one specific file. A few examples should make this clear:

  1. The source expression example.com has no path, and therefore matches any file served from that host.
  2. The source expression example.com/scripts/ matches any file in the scripts directory of example.com, and any of its subdirectories. For example, both https://example.com/scripts/file.js and https://example.com/scripts/js/file.js would match.
  3. The source expression example.com/scripts/file.js matches only the file named file.js in the scripts directory of example.com.
  4. Likewise, the source expression example.com/js matches only the file named js. In particular, note that it would not match files inside a directory named js. Files like example.com/js/file.js would be matched only if the source expression ended with a trailing "/", as in example.com/js/.

Note: Query strings have no impact on matching: the source expression example.com/file?key=value matches all of https://example.com/file, https://example.com/file?key=value, https://example.com/file?key=notvalue, and https://example.com/file?notkey=notvalue.

4.2.2.3 Paths and Redirects

To avoid leaking path information cross-origin (as discussed in Egor Homakov’s Using Content-Security-Policy for Evil), the matching algorithm ignores the path component of a source expression if the resource being loaded is the result of a redirect. For example, given a page with an active policy of img-src example.com not-example.com/path:

  • Directly loading https://not-example.com/not-path would fail, as it doesn’t match the policy.
  • Directly loading https://example.com/redirector would pass, as it matches example.com.
  • Assuming that https://example.com/redirector delivered a redirect response pointing to https://not-example.com/not-path, the load would succeed, as the initial URL matches example.com, and the redirect target matches not-example.com/path if we ignore its path component.

This restriction reduces the granularity of a document’s policy when redirects are in play, which isn’t wonderful, but given that we certainly don’t want to allow brute-forcing paths after redirects, it seems a reasonable compromise.

The relatively long thread "Remove paths from CSP?" from public-webappsec@w3.org has more detailed discussion around alternate proposals.

4.2.3 The nonce attribute

Nonce sources require a new attribute to be added to both script and style elements: nonce.

partial interface HTMLScriptElement {
  attribute DOMString nonce;
};
nonce
This attribute reflects the value of the element’s nonce content attribute.
partial interface HTMLStyleElement {
  attribute DOMString nonce;
};
nonce
This attribute reflects the value of the element’s nonce content attribute.

4.2.4 Valid Nonces

An element has a valid nonce for a set of source expressions if the value of the element’s nonce attribute after stripping leading and trailing whitespace is a case-sensitive match for the nonce-value component of at least one nonce-source expression in set of source expressions.

4.2.5 Valid Hashes

An element’s content is the script block’s source for script elements, or the value of the element’s textContent IDL attribute for non-script elements such as style.

The digest of element’s content for is the result of applying an algorithm to the element’s content.

To determine whether element has a valid hash for a set of source expressions, execute the following steps:

  1. Let hashes be a list of all hash-source expressions in set of source expressions.
  2. For each hash in hashes:
    1. Let algorithm be:
      • SHA-256 if the hash-algo component of hash is a case-insensitive match for the string "sha256"
      • SHA-384 if the hash-algo component of hash is a case-insensitive match for the string "sha384"
      • SHA-512 if the hash-algo component of hash is a case-insensitive match for the string "sha512"
    2. Let expected be the hash-value component of hash.
    3. Let actual be the base64 encoding of the binary digest of element’s content using the algorithm algorithm.
    4. If actual is a case-sensitive match for expected, return true and abort these steps.
  3. Return false.

Note: If an element has an invalid hash, it would be helpful if the user agent reported the failure to the author by adding a warning message containing the actual hash value.

4.3 Media Type List

The plugin-types directive uses a value consisting of a media type list.

Each media type in the media type list represents a specific type of resource that can be retrieved and used to instantiate a plugin in the protected resource.

media-type-list   = media-type *( 1*WSP media-type )
media-type        = <type from RFC 2045> "/" <subtype from RFC 2045>

4.3.1 Parsing

To parse a media type list media type list, the user agent MUST use an algorithm equivalent to the following:

  1. Let the set of media types be the empty set.
  2. For each token returned by splitting media type list on spaces, if the token matches the grammar for media-type, add the token to the set of media types. Otherwise ignore the token.
  3. Return the set of media types.

4.3.2 Matching

A media type matches a media type list if, and only if, the media type is a case-insensitive match for at least one token in the set of media types obtained by parsing the media type list.

4.4 Reporting

To strip uri for reporting, the user agent MUST use an algorithm equivalent to the following:

  1. If the origin of uri is a globally unique identifier (for example, uri has a scheme of data, blob, or filesystem), then abort these steps, and return the ASCII serialization of uri’s scheme.
  2. If the origin of uri is not the same as the origin of the protected resource, then abort these steps, and return the ASCII serialization of uri’s origin.
  3. Return uri, with any fragment component removed.

To generate a violation report object, the user agent MUST use an algorithm equivalent to the following:

  1. Prepare a JSON object violation with the following keys and values:
    blocked-uri
    The originally requested URI of the resource that was prevented from loading, stripped for reporting, or the empty string if the resource has no URI (inline script and inline style, for example).
    document-uri
    The address of the protected resource, stripped for reporting.
    effective-directive
    The name of the policy directive that was violated. This will contain the directive whose enforcement triggered the violation (e.g. "script-src") even if that directive does not explicitly appear in the policy, but is implicitly activated via the default-src directive.
    original-policy
    The original policy, as received by the user agent.
    referrer
    The referrer attribute of the protected resource, or the empty string if the protected resource has no referrer.
    status-code
    The status-code of the HTTP response that contained the protected resource, if the protected resource was obtained over HTTP. Otherwise, the number 0.
    violated-directive
    The policy directive that was violated, as it appears in the policy. This will contain the default-src directive in the case of violations caused by falling back to the default sources when enforcing a directive.
  2. If a specific line or a specific file can be identified as the cause of the violation (for example, script execution that violates the script-src directive), the user agent MAY add the following keys and values to violation:
    source-file
    The URI of the resource where the violation occurred, stripped for reporting.
    line-number
    The line number in source-file on which the violation occurred.
    column-number
    The column number in source-file on which the violation occurred.
  3. Return violation.

Note: blocked-uri will not contain the final location of a resource that was blocked after one or more redirects. It instead will contain only the location that the protected resource requested, before any redirects were followed.

To send violation reports, the user agent MUST use an algorithm equivalent to the following:

  1. Prepare a JSON object report object with a single key, csp-report, whose value is the result of generating a violation report object.
  2. Let report body be the JSON stringification of report object.
  3. For each report URI in the set of report URIs:
    1. If the user agent has already sent a violation report for the protected resource to report URI, and that report contained an entity body that exactly matches report body, the user agent MAY abort these steps and continue to the next report URI.
    2. Queue a task to fetch report URI from the origin of the protected resource, with the synchronous flag not set, using HTTP method POST, with a Content-Type header field of application/csp-report, and an entity body consisting of report body. If the origin of report URI is not the same as the origin of the protected resource, the block cookies flag MUST also be set. The user agent MUST NOT follow redirects when fetching this resource. (Note: The user agent ignores the fetched resource.) The task source for these tasks is the Content Security Policy task source.

To report a violation, the user agent MUST:

  1. Fire a violation event at the protected resource’s Document.
  2. If the set of report URIs is non-empty, send violation reports to each.

Note: This section of the specification should not be interpreted as limiting user agents' ability to apply restrictions to violation reports in order to limit data leakage above and beyond what these algorithms specify.

5 Processing Model

To enforce a policy, the user agent MUST parse the policy and enforce each of the directives contained in the policy, where the specific requirements for enforcing each directive are defined separately for each directive (See §7 Directives, below).

Generally speaking, enforcing a directive prevents the protected resource from performing certain actions, such as loading scripts from URIs other than those indicated in a source list. These restrictions make it more difficult for an attacker to abuse an injection vulnerability in the resource because the attacker will be unable to usurp the resource’s privileges that have been restricted in this way.

Note: User agents may allow users to modify or bypass policy enforcement through user preferences, bookmarklets, third-party additions to the user agent, and other such mechanisms.

To monitor a policy, the user agent MUST parse the policy and monitor each of the directives contained in the policy.

Monitoring a directive does not prevent the protected resource from undertaking any actions. Instead, any actions that would have been prevented by the directives are allowed, but a violation report is generated and reported to the developer of the web application. Monitoring a policy is useful for testing whether enforcing the policy will cause the web application to malfunction.

A server MAY cause user agents to monitor one policy while enforcing another policy by returning both Content-Security-Policy and Content-Security-Policy-Report-Only header fields. For example, if a server operator may wish to enforce one policy but experiment with a stricter policy, she can monitor the stricter policy while enforcing the original policy. Once the server operator is satisfied that the stricter policy does not break the web application, the server operator can start enforcing the stricter policy.

If the user agent monitors or enforces a policy that does not contain any directives, the user agent SHOULD report a warning message in the developer console.

If the user agent monitors or enforces a policy that contains an unrecognized directive, the user agent SHOULD report a warning message in the developer console indicating the name of the unrecognized directive.

If the user agent monitors or enforces a policy that contains a directive that contains a source list, then the user agent MUST set a CSP Request Header when requesting cross-origin resources, as described in §3.4 The CSP HTTP Request Header.

5.1 Workers

Whenever a user agent runs a worker:

5.2 srcdoc IFrames

Whenever a user agent creates an iframe srcdoc document in a browsing context nested in the protected resource, if the user agent is enforcing any policies for the protected resource, the user agent MUST enforce those policies on the iframe srcdoc document as well.

Whenever a user agent creates an iframe srcdoc document in a browsing context nested in the protected resource, if the user agent is monitoring any policies for the protected resource, the user agent MUST monitor those policies on the iframe srcdoc document as well.

6 Script Interfaces

6.1 SecurityPolicyViolationEvent Interface

[Constructor(DOMString type, optional SecurityPolicyViolationEventInit eventInitDict)]
interface SecurityPolicyViolationEvent : Event {
    readonly    attribute DOMString documentURI;
    readonly    attribute DOMString referrer;
    readonly    attribute DOMString blockedURI;
    readonly    attribute DOMString violatedDirective;
    readonly    attribute DOMString effectiveDirective;
    readonly    attribute DOMString originalPolicy;
    readonly    attribute DOMString sourceFile;
    readonly    attribute DOMString statusCode;
    readonly    attribute long      lineNumber;
    readonly    attribute long      columnNumber;
};
documentURI
Refer to the document-uri property of violation reports for a description of this property.
referrer
Refer to the referrer property of violation reports for a description of this property.
blockedURI
Refer to the blocked-uri property of violation reports for a description of this property.
violatedDirective
Refer to the violated-directive property of violation reports for a description of this property.
effectiveDirective
Refer to the effective-directive property of violation reports for a description of this property.
originalPolicy
Refer to the original-policy property of violation reports for a description of this property.
statusCode
Refer to the status-code property of violation reports for a description of this property.
sourceFile
Refer to the source-file property of violation reports for a description of this property.
lineNumber
Refer to the line-number property of violation reports for a description of this property.
columnNumber
Refer to the column-number property of violation reports for a description of this property.

6.2 SecurityPolicyViolationEventInit Interface

dictionary SecurityPolicyViolationEventInit : EventInit {
    DOMString documentURI;
    DOMString referrer;
    DOMString blockedURI;
    DOMString violatedDirective;
    DOMString effectiveDirective;
    DOMString originalPolicy;
    DOMString sourceFile;
    long      lineNumber;
    long      columnNumber;
};
documentURI
Refer to the document-uri property of violation reports for a description of this property.
referrer
Refer to the referrer property of violation reports for a description of this property.
blockedURI
Refer to the blocked-uri property of violation reports for a description of this property.
violatedDirective
Refer to the violated-directive property of violation reports for a description of this property.
effectiveDirective
Refer to the effective-directive property of violation reports for a description of this property.
originalPolicy
Refer to the original-policy property of violation reports for a description of this property.
sourceFile
Refer to the source-file property of violation reports for a description of this property.
lineNumber
Refer to the line-number property of violation reports for a description of this property.
columnNumber
Refer to the column-number property of violation reports for a description of this property.

6.3 Firing Violation Events

To fire a violation event, the user agent MUST use an algorithm equivalent to the following:

  1. Let report object be the result of generating a violation report object.
  2. Queue a task to fire an event named securitypolicyviolation using the SecurityPolicyViolationEvent interface with the following initializations:
    • blockedURI MUST be initialized to the value of report object’s blocked-uri key.
    • documentURI MUST be initialized to the value of report object’s document-uri key.
    • effectiveDirective MUST be initialized to the value of report object’s effective-directive key.
    • originalPolicy MUST be initialized to the value of report object’s original-policy key.
    • referrer MUST be initialized to the value of report object’s referrer key.
    • violatedDirective MUST be initialized to the value of report object’s violated-directive key.
    • sourceFile MUST be initialized to the value of report object’s source-file key.
    • lineNumber MUST be initialized to the value of report object’s line-number key.
    • columnNumber MUST be initialized to the value of report object’s column-number key.

The task source for these tasks is the Content Security Policy task source.

7 Directives

This section describes the content security policy directives introduced in this specification. Directive names are case insensitive.

In order to protect against Cross-Site Scripting (XSS), web application authors SHOULD include:

In either case, authors SHOULD NOT include either 'unsafe-inline' or data: as valid sources in their policies. Both enable XSS attacks by allowing code to be included directly in the document itself; they are best avoided completely.

Redirects are another area of potential concern. Authors SHOULD NOT include 'unsafe-redirect' as valid sources in their policies. It makes it more difficult to reason about the complete set of resources that a policy allows, especially given the path behavior outlined in the §4.2.2.3 Paths and Redirects section.

7.1 base-uri

The base-uri directive restricts the URIs that can be used to specify the document base URL. The syntax for the name and value of the directive are described by the following ABNF grammar:

directive-name    = "base-uri"
directive-value   = source-list

The term allowed base URIs refers to the result of parsing the base-uri directive’s value as a source list.

Step 4 of the algorithm defined in HTML5 to obtain a document’s base URL MUST be changed to:

  1. If the previous step was not successful, or the result of the previous step does not match the allowed base URIs, then the document base URL is fallback base URL. Otherwise, it is the result of the previous step.

7.2 child-src

The child-src directive governs the creation of nested browsing contexts as well as Worker execution contexts. The syntax for the name and value of the directive are described by the following ABNF grammar:

directive-name    = "child-src"
directive-value   = source-list

The term allowed child sources refers to the result of parsing the child-src directive’s value as a source list if a child-src directive is explicitly specified, and otherwise to the default sources.

7.2.1 Nested Browsing Contexts

To enforce the child-src directive the user agent MUST enforce the frame-src directive.

7.2.2 Workers

Whenever the user agent fetches a URL while processing the Worker or SharedWorker constructors [WORKERS], the user agent MUST act as if there was a fatal network error and no resource was obtained, and report a violation if the URI does not match the allowed child sources.

7.3 connect-src

The connect-src directive restricts which URIs the protected resource can load using script interfaces. The syntax for the name and value of the directive are described by the following ABNF grammar:

directive-name    = "connect-src"
directive-value   = source-list

The term allowed connection targets refers to the result of parsing the connect-src directive’s value as a source list if the policy contains an explicit connect-src directive, or otherwise to the default sources.

Whenever the user agent fetches a URI in the course of one of the following activities, if the URI does not match the allowed connection targets, the user agent MUST act as if there was a fatal network error and no resource was obtained, and report a violation:

7.3.1 Usage

This section is not normative.

JavaScript offers a few mechanisms that directly connect to an external server to send or receive information. EventSource maintains an open HTTP connection to a server in order to receive push notifications, WebSockets open a bidirectional communication channel between your browser and a server, and XMLHttpRequest makes arbitrary HTTP requests on your behalf. These are powerful APIs that enable useful functionality, but also provide tempting avenues for data exfiltration.

The connect-src directive allows you to ensure that these sorts of connections are only opened to origins you trust. Sending a policy that defines a list of source expressions for this directive is straightforward. For example, to limit connections to only example.com, send the following header:

Content-Security-Policy: connect-src example.com

All of the following will fail with the preceding directive in place:

  • new WebSocket("wss://evil.com/");
  • (new XMLHttpRequest()).open("GET", "https://evil.com/", true);
  • new EventSource("https://evil.com");

7.4 default-src

The default-src directive sets a default source list for a number of directives. The syntax for the name and value of the directive are described by the following ABNF grammar:

directive-name    = "default-src"
directive-value   = source-list

Let the default sources be the result of parsing the default-src directive’s value as a source list if a default-src directive is explicitly specified, and otherwise the U+002A ASTERISK character (*).

To enforce the default-src directive, the user agent MUST enforce the following directives:

If not specified explicitly in the policy, the directives listed above will use the default sources as their source list.

7.4.1 Usage

This section is not normative.

default-src, as the name implies, serves as a default source list which the other source list-style directives will use as a fallback if they’re not otherwise explicitly set. That is, consider the following policy declaration:

Content-Security-Policy: default-src 'self'

Under this policy, fonts, frames, images, media, objects, scripts, and styles will all only load from the same origin as the protected resource, and connections will only be made to the same origin. Adding a more specific declaration to the policy would completely override the default source list for that resource type.

Content-Security-Policy: default-src 'self'; script-src example.com

Under this new policy, fonts, frames, and etc. continue to be load from the same origin, but scripts will only load from example.com. There’s no inheritance; the script-src directive sets the allowed sources of script, and the default list is not used for that resource type.

Given this behavior, one good way of building a policy for a site would be to begin with a default-src of 'none', and to build up a policy from there that contains only those resource types which are actually in use for the page you’d like to protect. If you don’t use webfonts, for instance, there’s no reason to specify a source list for font-src; specifying only those resource types a page uses ensures that the possible attack surface for that page remains as small as possible.

7.5 font-src

The font-src directive restricts from where the protected resource can load fonts. The syntax for the name and value of the directive are described by the following ABNF grammar:

directive-name    = "font-src"
directive-value   = source-list

The term allowed font sources refers to the result of parsing the font-src directive’s value as a source list if the policy contains an explicit font-src, or otherwise to the default sources.

Whenever the user agent fetches a URI in the course of one of the following activities, if the URI does not match the allowed font sources, the user agent MUST act as if there was a fatal network error and no resource was obtained, and report a violation:

7.6 form-action

The form-action restricts which URIs can be used as the action of HTML form elements. The syntax for the name and value of the directive are described by the following ABNF grammar:

directive-name    = "form-action"
directive-value   = source-list

The term allowed form actions refers to the result of parsing the form-action directive’s value as a source list.

Whenever the user agent fetches a URI in the course of one of the following activities, if the URI does not match the allowed form actions, the user agent MUST act as if there was a fatal network error and no resource was obtained, and report a violation:

Note: form-action does not fall back to the default sources when the directive is not defined. That is, a policy that defines default-src 'none' but not form-action will still allow form submissions to any target.

7.7 frame-ancestors

The frame-ancestors directive indicates whether the user agent should allow embedding the resource using a frame, iframe, object, embed or applet tag, or equivalent functionality in non-HTML resources. Resources can use this directive to avoid many UI Redressing [UIREDRESS] attacks by avoiding being embedded into potentially hostile contexts.

The syntax for the name and value of the directive are described by the following ABNF grammar:

ancestor-source-list = [ ancestor-source *( 1*WSP ancestor-source ) ] / "'none'"
ancestor-source      = scheme-source / host-source
directive-name  = "frame-ancestors"
directive-value = ancestor-source-list

The term allowed frame ancestors refers to the result of parsing the frame-ancestors directive’s value as a source list. If a frame-ancestors directive is not explicitly included in the policy, then allowed frame ancestors is "*".

To enforce the frame-ancestors directive, whenever the user agent would load the protected resource into a nested browsing context, the user agent MUST perform the following steps:

  1. Let nestedContext be the nested browsing context into which the protected resource is being loaded.
  2. Let ancestorList be the list of all ancestors of nestedContext.
  3. For each ancestorContext in ancestorList:
    1. Let document be ancestorContext’s active document.
    2. If document’s URL does not match the allowed frame ancestors, the user agent MUST:
      1. Abort loading the protected resource.
      2. Act as if it received an empty HTTP 200 response.
      3. Parse a sandboxing directive using the empty string as the input and the newly created document’s forced sandboxing flag set as the output.

Steps 2.2 and 2.3 ensure that the blocked frame appears to be a normal cross-origin document’s load. If these steps are ignored, leakage of a document’s policy state is possible. The user agent MAY implement these steps by instead redirecting the user to friendly error page in a unique origin which provides the option of opening the blocked page in a new top-level browsing context.

The frame-ancestors directive MUST be ignored when monitoring a policy, and when a contained in a policy defined via a meta element.

Note: frame-ancestors does not fall back to the default sources when the directive is not defined. That is, a policy that defines default-src 'none' but not frame-ancestors will still allow the resource to be framed from anywhere.

When generating a violation report for a frame-ancestors violation, the user agent MUST NOT include the value of the embedding ancestor as a blocked-uri value unless it is same-origin with the protected resource, as disclosing the value of cross-origin ancestors is a violation of the Same-Origin Policy.

7.7.1 Relation to X-Frame-Options

This directive is similar to the X-Frame-Options header that several user agents have implemented. The 'none' source expression is roughly equivalent to that header’s DENY, 'self' to SAMEORIGIN, and so on. The major difference is that many user agents implement SAMEORIGIN such that it only matches against the top-level document’s location. This directive checks each ancestor. If any ancestor doesn’t match, the load is cancelled. [RFC7034]

The frame-ancestors directive obsoletes the X-Frame-Options header. If a resource has both policies, the frame-ancestors policy SHOULD be enforced and the X-Frame-Options policy SHOULD be ignored.

7.7.2 Multiple Host Source Values

This section is not normative.

Multiple source-list expressions are allowed in a single policy (in contrast to X-Frame-Options, which allows only one) to enable scenarios involving embedded application components that are multiple levels below the top-level browsing context.

Many common scenarios for permissioned embedding (e.g. embeddable payment, sharing or social apps) involve potentially many hundreds or thousands of valid source-list expressions, but it is strongly recommended against accommodating such scenarios with a static frame-ancestors directive listing multiple values. In such cases it is beneficial to generate this value dynamically, based on an HTTP Referer header or an explicitly passed-in value, to allow only the sources necessary for each given embedding of the resource.

Consider a service providing a payments application at https://payments/makeEmbedded. The service allows this resource to be embedded by both merchant Alice and merchant Bob, who compete with each other. Sending:

Content-Security-Policy: frame-ancestors https://alice https://bob

would allow Bob to re-frame Alice’s resource and create fraudulent clicks, perhaps discrediting Alice with her customers or the payments service. If the payments service used additional information (e.g. as part of a URL like https://payments/makeEmbedded?merchant=alice) to send individually-tailored headers listing only the source-list expressions needed by each merchant, this attack would be eliminated.

7.8 frame-src

The frame-src directive is deprecated. Authors who wish to govern nested browsing contexts SHOULD use the child-src directive instead.

The frame-src directive restricts from where the protected resource can embed frames. The syntax for the name and value of the directive are described by the following ABNF grammar:

directive-name    = "frame-src"
directive-value   = source-list

The term allowed frame sources refers to the result of parsing the frame-src directive’s value as a source list if the policy contains an explicit frame-src, or otherwise to the list of allowed child sources.

Whenever the user agent fetches a URI in the course of one of the following activities, if the URI does not match the allowed frame sources, the user agent MUST act as if there was a fatal network error and no resource was obtained, and report a violation:

7.9 img-src

The img-src directive restricts from where the protected resource can load images. The syntax for the name and value of the directive are described by the following ABNF grammar:

directive-name    = "img-src"
directive-value   = source-list

The term allowed image sources refers to the result of parsing the img-src directive’s value as a source list if the policy contains an explicit img-src, or otherwise to the list of default sources.

Whenever the user agent fetches a URI in the course of one of the following activities, if the URI does not match the allowed image sources, the user agent MUST act as if there was a fatal network error and no resource was obtained, and report a violation:

7.10 media-src

The media-src directive restricts from where the protected resource can load video, audio, and associated text tracks. The syntax for the name and value of the directive are described by the following ABNF grammar:

directive-name    = "media-src"
directive-value   = source-list

The term allowed media sources refers to the result of parsing the media-src directive’s value as a source list if the policy contains an explicit media-src, or otherwise to the list of default sources.

Whenever the user agent fetches a URI in the course of one of the following activities, if the URI does not match the allowed media sources, the user agent MUST act as if there was a fatal network error and no resource was obtained, and report a violation:

7.11 object-src

The object-src directive restricts from where the protected resource can load plugins. The syntax for the name and value of the directive are described by the following ABNF grammar:

directive-name    = "object-src"
directive-value   = source-list

The term allowed object sources refers to the result of parsing the object-src directive’s value as a source list if the policy contains an explicit object-src, or otherwise to the list of default sources.

Whenever the user agent fetches a URI in the course of one of the following activities, if the URI does not match the allowed object sources, the user agent MUST act as if there was a fatal network error and no resource was obtained, and report a violation:

It is not required that the consumer of the element’s data be a plugin in order for the object-src directive to be enforced. Data for any object, embed, or applet element MUST match the allowed object sources in order to be fetched. This is true even when the element data is semantically equivalent to content which would otherwise be restricted by one of the other directives, such as an object element with a text/html MIME type.

Whenever the user agent would load a plugin without an associated URI (e.g., because the object element lacked a data attribute), if the protected resource’s URI does not match the allowed object sources, the user agent MUST NOT load the plugin.

7.12 plugin-types

The plugin-types directive restricts the set of plugins that can be invoked by the protected resource by limiting the types of resources that can be embedded. The syntax for the name and value of the directive are described by the following ABNF grammar:

directive-name    = "plugin-types"
directive-value   = media-type-list

The term allowed plugin media types refers to the result of parsing the plugin-types directive’s value as a media type list.

Whenever the user agent would instantiate a plugin to handle resource while enforcing the plugin-types directive, the user agent MUST instead act as though the plugin reported an error and report a violation if any of the following conditions hold:

Note: In any of these cases, acting as though the plugin reported an error will cause the user agent to display the fallback content.

Whenever the user agent creates a plugin document in a nested browsing context in the protected resource, if the user agent is enforcing any plugin-types directives for the protected resource, the user agent MUST enforce those plugin-types directives on the plugin document as well.

Whenever the user agent creates a plugin document in a nested browsing context in the protected resource, if the user agent is monitoring any plugin-types directives for the protected resource, the user agent MUST monitor those plugin-types directives on the plugin document as well.

7.12.1 Usage

This section is not normative.

The plugin-types directive whitelists a certain set of MIME types that can be embedded in a protected resource. For example, a site might want to ensure that PDF content loads, but that no other plugins can be instantiated. The following directive would satisfy that requirement:

Content-Security-Policy: plugin-types application/pdf

Resources embedded via an embed or object element delivered with an application/pdf content type would be rendered in the appropriate plugin; resources delivered with some other content type would be blocked. Multiple types can be specified, in any order. If the site decided to additionally allow Flash at some point in the future, it could do so with the following directive:

Content-Security-Policy: plugin-types application/pdf application/x-shockwave-flash

Note: Wildcards are not accepted in the plugin-types directive. Only the resource types explicitly listed in the directive will be allowed.

7.12.2 Predeclaration of expected media types

This section is not normative.

Enforcing the plugin-types directive requires that object and embed elements declare the expected media type of the resource they include via the type attribute. If an author expects to load a PDF, she could specify this as follows:

<object data="resource" type="application/pdf"></object>

If resource isn’t actually a PDF file, it won’t load. This prevents certain types of attacks that rely on serving content that unexpectedly invokes a plugin other than that which the author intended.

Note: resource will not load in this scenario even if its media type is otherwise whitelisted: resources will only load when their media type is whitelisted and matches the declared type in their containing element.

7.13 referrer

The referrer directive specifies the referrer policy [REFERRER] that the user agent applies when determining what referrer information should be included with requests made, and with browsing contexts created from the context of the protected resource. The syntax for the name and value of the directive are described by the following ABNF grammar:

directive-name    = "referrer"
directive-value   = "no-referrer" / "no-referrer-when-downgrade" / "origin" / "origin-when-cross-origin" / "unsafe-url"

Note: The directive name does not share the HTTP header’s misspelling.

When enforcing the referrer directive, the user agent MUST execute [REFERRER]'s Set environment’s referrer policy to policy. algorithm on the protected resource’s JavaScript global environment using the result of executing the Determine token’s Policy algorithm on the referrer directive’s value.

7.13.1 Usage

This section is not normative.

A protected resource can prevent referrer leakage by specifying no-referrer as the value of its policy’s referrer directive:

Content-Security-Policy: referrer no-referrer;

This will cause all requests made from the protected resource’s context to have an empty Referer [sic] header.

7.14 reflected-xss

The reflected-xss directive instructs a user agent to activate or deactivate any heuristics used to filter or block reflected cross-site scripting attacks. The syntax for the name and value of the directive are described by the following ABNF grammar:

directive-name    = "reflected-xss"
directive-value   = "allow" / "block" / "filter"

A user agent with support for XSS protection MUST enforce this directive as follows:

If the user agent’s active protections against reflected cross-site scripting attacks detect or prevent script execution, the user agent MUST report a violation.

Note: The reflected-xss directive will be ignored if contained within a meta element.

7.14.1 Relationship to X-XSS-Protection

This directive is meant to subsume the functionality provided by the proprietary X-XSS-Protection HTTP header which is supported by a number of user agents. Roughly speaking:

  • reflected-xss allow is equivalent to X-XSS-Protection: 0
  • reflected-xss filter is equivalent to X-XSS-Protection: 1
  • reflected-xss block is equivalent to X-XSS-Protection: 1; mode=block

7.15 report-uri

The report-uri directive specifies a URI to which the user agent sends reports about policy violation. The syntax for the name and value of the directive are described by the following ABNF grammar:

directive-name    = "report-uri"
directive-value   = uri-reference *( 1*WSP uri-reference )
uri-reference     = <URI-reference from RFC 3986>

The set of report URIs is the value of the report-uri directive, each resolved relative to the protected resource’s URI.

The process of sending violation reports to the URIs specified in this directive’s value is defined in this document’s §4.4 Reporting section.

Note: The report-uri directive will be ignored if contained within a meta element.

7.16 sandbox

The sandbox directive specifies an HTML sandbox policy that the user agent applies to the protected resource. The syntax for the name and value of the directive are described by the following ABNF grammar:

directive-name    = "sandbox"
directive-value   = "" / sandbox-token *( 1*WSP sandbox-token )
sandbox-token     = <token from RFC 7230>

When enforcing the sandbox directive, the user agent MUST parse a sandboxing directive using the directive-value as the input and protected resource’s forced sandboxing flag set as the output. [HTML5]

Note: The sandbox directive will be ignored when monitoring a policy, and when contained in a policy defined via a meta element.

7.16.1 Usage

This section is not normative.

HTML5 defines a sandbox attribute for iframe elements, intended to allow web authors to reduce the risk of including potentially untrusted content by imposing restrictions on that content’s abilities. When the attribute is set, the content is forced into a unique origin, prevented from submitting forms, running script, creating or navigating other browsing contexts, and prevented from running plugins. These restrictions can be loosened by setting certain flags as the attribute’s value.

The sandbox directive allows any resource, framed or not, to ask for the same sorts of restrictions to be applied to itself.

For example, a message board or email system might provide downloads of arbitrary attachments provided by other users. Attacks that rely on tricking a client into rendering one of these attachments could be mitigated by requesting that resources only be rendered in a very restrictive sandbox. Sending the sandbox directive with an empty value establishes such an environment:

Content-Security-Policy: sandbox

More trusted resources might be allowed to run in an environment with fewer restrictions by adding allow-* flags to the directive’s value. For example, you can allow a page that you trust to run script, while ensuring that it isn’t treated as same-origin with the rest of your site. This can be accomplished by sending the sandbox directive with the allow-scripts flag:

Content-Security-Policy: sandbox allow-scripts

The set of flags available to the CSP directive should match those available to the iframe attribute. Currently, those include:

Note: Like the rest of Content Security Policy, the sandbox directive is meant as a defense-in-depth. Web authors would be well-served to use it in addition to standard sniffing-mitigation and privilege-reduction techniques.

7.17 script-src

The script-src directive restricts which scripts the protected resource can execute. The directive also controls other resources, such as XSLT style sheets [XSLT], which can cause the user agent to execute script. The syntax for the name and value of the directive are described by the following ABNF grammar:

directive-name    = "script-src"
directive-value   = source-list

The term allowed script sources refers to the result of parsing the script-src directive’s value as a source list if the policy contains an explicit script-src, or otherwise to the default sources.

If 'unsafe-inline' is not in the list of allowed script sources, or if at least one nonce-source or hash-source is present in the list of allowed script sources:

If 'unsafe-eval' is not in allowed script sources:

Whenever the user agent fetches a URI (including when following redirects) in the course of one of the following activities, if the URI does not match the allowed script sources, the user agent MUST act as if there was a fatal network error and no resource was obtained, and report a violation:

7.17.1 Nonce usage for script elements

This section is not normative.

The script-src directive lets developers specify exactly which script elements on a page were intentionally included for execution. Ideally, developers would avoid inline script entirely and whitelist scripts by URL. However, in some cases, removing inline scripts can be difficult or impossible. For those cases, developers can whitelist scripts using a randomly generated nonce.

Usage is straightforward. For each request, the server generates a unique value at random, and includes it in the Content-Security-Policy header:

Content-Security-Policy: default-src 'self';
                         script-src 'self' https://example.com 'nonce-$RANDOM'

This same value is then applied as a nonce attribute to each script element that ought to be executed. For example, if the server generated the random value Nc3n83cnSAd3wc3Sasdfn939hc3, the server would send the following policy:

Content-Security-Policy: default-src 'self';
                         script-src 'self' https://example.com 'nonce-Nc3n83cnSAd3wc3Sasdfn939hc3'

Script elements can then execute either because their src URLs are whitelisted or because they have a valid nonce:

<script>
alert("Blocked because the policy doesn’t have 'unsafe-inline'.")
</script>
<script nonce="EDNnf03nceIOfn39fn3e9h3sdfa">
alert("Still blocked because nonce is wrong.")
</script>
<script nonce="Nc3n83cnSAd3wc3Sasdfn939hc3">
alert("Allowed because nonce is valid.")
</script>
<script src="https://example.com/allowed-because-of-src.js"></script>
<script nonce="EDNnf03nceIOfn39fn3e9h3sdfa"
    src="https://elsewhere.com/blocked-because-nonce-is-wrong.js"></script>
<script nonce="Nc3n83cnSAd3wc3Sasdfn939hc3"
    src="https://elsewhere.com/allowed-because-nonce-is-valid.js"></script>

Note that the nonce’s value is not a hash or signature that verifies the contents of the script resources. It’s quite simply a random string that informs the user agent which scripts were intentionally included in the page.

Script elements with the proper nonce execute, regardless of whether they’re inline or external. Script elements without the proper nonce don’t execute unless their URLs are whitelisted. Even if an attacker is able to inject markup into the protected resource, the attack will be blocked by the attacker’s inability to guess the random value.

7.17.2 Hash usage for script elements

This section is not normative.

The script-src directive lets developers whitelist a particular inline script by specifying its hash as an allowed source of script.

Usage is straightforward. The server computes the hash of a particular script block’s contents, and includes the base64 encoding of that value in the Content-Security-Policy header:

Content-Security-Policy: default-src 'self';
                         script-src 'self' https://example.com 'sha256-base64 encoded hash'

Each inline script block’s contents are hashed, and compared against the whitelisted value. If there’s a match, the script is executed. For example, the SHA-256 digest of alert('Hello, world.'); is YWIzOWNiNzJjNDRlYzc4MTgwMDhmZDlkOWI0NTAyMjgyY2MyMWJlMWUyNjc1ODJlYWJhNjU5MGU4NmZmNGU3OAo=. If the server sent the following header:

Content-Security-Policy: script-src 'sha256-YWIzOWNiNzJjNDRlYzc4MTgwMDhmZDlkOWI0NTAyMjgyY2MyMWJlMWUyNjc1ODJlYWJhNjU5MGU4NmZmNGU3OAo='

Then the following script tag would result in script execution:

<script>alert('Hello, world.');</script>

Whitespace is significant. The following scripts blocks would not hash to the same value, and would therefore not execute:

<script> alert('Hello, world.');</script>
<script>alert('Hello, world.'); </script>
<script> alert('Hello, world.'); </script>
<script>
alert('Hello, world.');
</script>

Note also that the hash applies only to inline script. An externalized script containing the value alert('Hello, world.'); would not execute if its origin was not whitelisted as a valid source of script.

7.18 style-src

The style-src directive restricts which styles the user may applies to the protected resource. The syntax for the name and value of the directive are described by the following ABNF grammar:

directive-name    = "style-src"
directive-value   = source-list

The term allowed style sources refers to the result of parsing the style-src directive’s value as a source list if the policy contains an explicit style-src, or otherwise to the default sources.

If 'unsafe-inline' is not in the list of allowed style sources, or if at least one nonce-source or hash-source is present in the list of allowed style sources:

Note: These restrictions on inline do not prevent the user agent from applying style from an external stylesheet (e.g., found via <link rel="stylesheet" ...>).

If 'unsafe-eval' is not in allowed style sources, then:

Whenever the user agent fetches a URI in the course of one of the following activities, if the URI does not match the allowed style sources, the user agent MUST act as if there was a fatal network error and no resource was obtained, and report a violation:

Note: The style-src directive does not restrict the use of XSLT. XSLT is restricted by the script-src directive because the security consequences of including an untrusted XSLT stylesheet are similar to those incurred by including an untrusted script.

7.18.1 Nonce usage for style elements

This section is not normative.

See the script-src nonce usage information for detail; the application of nonces to style elements is similar enough to avoid repetition here.

7.18.2 Hash usage for style elements

This section is not normative.

See the script-src hash usage information for detail; the application of hashes to style elements is similar enough to avoid repetition here.

8 Examples

8.1 Sample Policy Definitions

This section provides some sample use cases and supporting policies.

A server wishes to load resources only from its own origin:
Content-Security-Policy: default-src 'self'
An auction site wishes to load images from any URI, plugin content from a list of trusted media providers (including a content distribution network), and scripts only from a server under its control hosting sanitized ECMAScript:
Content-Security-Policy:
    default-src 'self'; img-src *;
    object-src media1.example.com media2.example.com *.cdn.example.com;
    script-src trustedscripts.example.com
An online banking site wishes to ensure that all of the content in its pages is loaded over TLS to prevent attackers from eavesdropping on insecure content requests:
Content-Security-Policy: default-src https: 'unsafe-inline' 'unsafe-eval'

This policy allows inline content (such as inline script elements), use of eval, and loading resources over https. Note: This policy does not provide any protection from cross-site scripting vulnerabilities.

A website that relies on inline script elements wishes to ensure that script is only executed from its own origin, and those elements it intentionally inserted inline:
Content-Security-Policy: script-src 'self' 'nonce-$RANDOM';

The inline script elements would then only execute if they contained a matching nonce attribute:

<script nonce="$RANDOM">...</script>

8.2 Sample Violation Report

This section contains an example violation report the user agent might sent to a server when the protected resource violations a sample policy.

In the following example, the user agent rendered a representation of the resource http://example.org/page.html with the following policy:

default-src 'self'; report-uri http://example.org/csp-report.cgi

The protected resource loaded an image from http://evil.example.com/image.png, violating the policy.

{
  "csp-report": {
    "document-uri": "http://example.org/page.html",
    "referrer": "http://evil.example.com/haxor.html",
    "blocked-uri": "http://evil.example.com/image.png",
    "violated-directive": "default-src 'self'",
    "effective-directive": "img-src",
    "original-policy": "default-src 'self'; report-uri http://example.org/csp-report.cgi"
  }
}

9 Security Considerations

9.1 Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) Parsing

The style-src directive restricts the locations from which the protected resource can load styles. However, if the user agent uses a lax CSS parsing algorithm, an attacker might be able to trick the user agent into accepting malicious "stylesheets" hosted by an otherwise trustworthy origin.

These attacks are similar to the CSS cross-origin data leakage attack described by Chris Evans in 2009. User agents SHOULD defend against both attacks using the same mechanism: stricter CSS parsing rules for style sheets with improper MIME types.

9.2 Violation Reports

The violation reporting mechanism in this document has been designed to mitigate the risk that a malicious web site could use violation reports to probe the behavior of other servers. For example, consider a malicious web site that white lists https://example.com as a source of images. If the malicious site attempts to load https://example.com/login as an image, and the example.com server redirects to an identity provider (e.g., idenityprovider.example.net), CSP will block the request. If violation reports contained the full blocked URI, the violation report might contain sensitive information contained in the redirected URI, such as session identifiers or purported identities. For this reason, the user agent includes only the origin of the blocked URI.

10 Implementation Considerations

The Content-Security-Policy header is an end-to-end header. It is processed and enforced at the client and, therefore, SHOULD NOT be modified or removed by proxies or other intermediaries not in the same administrative domain as the resource.

The originating administrative domain for a resource might wish to apply a Content-Security-Policy header outside of the immediate context of an application. For example, a large organization might have many resources and applications managed by different individuals or teams but all subject to a uniform organizational standard. In such situations, a Content-Security-Policy header might be added or combined with an existing one at a network-edge security gateway device or web application firewall. To enforce multiple policies, the administrator SHOULD combine the policy into a single header. An administrator might wish to use different combination algorithms depending on his or her intended semantics.

One sensible policy combination algorithm is to start by allowing a default set of sources and then letting individual upstream resource owners expand the set of allowed sources by including additional origins. In this approach, the resultant policy is the union of all allowed origins in the input policies.

Another sensible policy combination algorithm is to intersect the given policies. This approach enforces that content comes from a certain whitelist of origins, for example, preventing developers from including third-party scripts or content in violation of organizational standards and practices. In this approach, the combination algorithm forms the combined policy by removing disallowed hosts from the policies supplied by upstream resource owners.

Interactions between the default-src and other directives SHOULD be given special consideration when combining policies. If none of the policies contains a default-src directive, adding new src directives results in a more restrictive policy. However, if one or more of the input policies contain a default-src directive, adding new src directives might result in a less restrictive policy, for example, if the more specific directive contains a more permissive set of allowed origins.

Using a more restrictive policy than the input policy authored by the resource owner might prevent the resource from rendering or operating as intended.

Note also that migration to HTTPS from HTTP may require updates to the policy in order to keep things running as before. Source expressions like http://example.com do not match HTTPS resources. For example, administrators SHOULD carefully examine existing policies before rolling out HTTP Strict Transport Security headers for an application. [RFC6797]

11 IANA Considerations

The permanent message header field registry should be updated with the following registrations: [RFC3864]

11.1 Content-Security-Policy

Header field name
Content-Security-Policy
Applicable protocol
http
Status
standard
Author/Change controller
W3C
Specification document
This specification (See Content-Security-Policy Header Field)

11.2 Content-Security-Policy-Report-Only

Header field name
Content-Security-Policy-Report-Only
Applicable protocol
http
Status
standard
Author/Change controller
W3C
Specification document
This specification (See Content-Security-Policy-Report-Only Header Field)

11.3 CSP

Header field name
CSP
Applicable protocol
http
Status
standard
Author/Change controller
W3C
Specification document
This specification (See §3.4 The CSP HTTP Request Header)

12 Acknowledgements

In addition to the documents in the W3C Web Application Security working group, the work on this document is also informed by the work of the IETF websec working group, particularly that working group’s requirements document: draft-hodges-websec-framework-reqs.

A portion of the frame-ancestors directive was originally developed as X-Frame-Options. [RFC7034]

Conformance

Document conventions

Conformance requirements are expressed with a combination of descriptive assertions and RFC 2119 terminology. The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in the normative parts of this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119. However, for readability, these words do not appear in all uppercase letters in this specification.

All of the text of this specification is normative except sections explicitly marked as non-normative, examples, and notes. [RFC2119]

Examples in this specification are introduced with the words "for example" or are set apart from the normative text with class="example", like this:

This is an example of an informative example.

Informative notes begin with the word "Note" and are set apart from the normative text with class="note", like this:

Note, this is an informative note.

Conformant Algorithms

Requirements phrased in the imperative as part of algorithms (such as "strip any leading space characters" or "return false and abort these steps") are to be interpreted with the meaning of the key word ("must", "should", "may", etc) used in introducing the algorithm.

Conformance requirements phrased as algorithms or specific steps can be implemented in any manner, so long as the end result is equivalent. In particular, the algorithms defined in this specification are intended to be easy to understand and are not intended to be performant. Implementers are encouraged to optimize.

Conformance Classes

A conformant user agent must implement all the requirements listed in this specification that are applicable to user agents.

A conformant server must implement all the requirements listed in this specification that are applicable to servers.

References

Normative References

[ABNF]
Dave Crocker; Paul Overell. Augmented BNF for Syntax Specifications: ABNF. RFC. URL: http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc5234.txt
[BEACON]
Jatinder Mann; Alois Reitbauer. Beacon. WD. URL: http://www.w3.org/TR/beacon/
[CSS3-FONTS]
John Daggett. CSS Fonts Module Level 3. 12 February 2013. W3C Working Draft. (Work in progress.) URL: http://www.w3.org/TR/2013/WD-css3-fonts-20130212/
[CSS4-IMAGES]
Elika J. Etemad; Tab Atkins Jr.. CSS Image Values and Replaced Content Module Level 4. 11 September 2012. W3C Working Draft. (Work in progress.) URL: http://www.w3.org/TR/2012/WD-css4-images-20120911/
[CSSOM]
Anne van Kesteren. CSSOM. 12 July 2011. W3C Working Draft. (Work in progress.) URL: http://www.w3.org/TR/2011/WD-cssom-20110712/
[ECMA-262]
???. ECMAScript Language Specification, Third Edition. December 1999. URL: http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecma-262.htm
[EVENTSOURCE]
Ian Hickson. Server-Sent Events. 11 December 2012. W3C Candidate Recommendation. (Work in progress.) URL: http://www.w3.org/TR/2012/CR-eventsource-20121211/
[HTML-IMPORTS]
Dmitri Glazkov; Hajime Morrita. HTML Imports. WD. URL: http://www.w3.org/TR/html-imports/
[HTML5]
Robin Berjon; et al. HTML5. 17 June 2014. W3C Candidate Recommendation. (Work in progress.) URL: http://www.w3.org/TR/2014/WD-html5-20140617/
[REFERRER]
Jochen Eisinger; Mike West. Referrer Policy. FPWD. URL: https://w3c.github.io/webappsec/specs/referrer-policy/
[RFC2119]
S. Bradner. Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Levels. URL: http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2119.txt
[RFC3492]
Adam M. Costello. Punycode: A Bootstring encoding of Unicode for Internationalized Domain Names in Applications (IDNA). REC. URL: http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3492.txt
[RFC3864]
Graham Klyne; Mark Nottingham; Jeffrey C. Mogul. Registration Procedures for Message Header Fields. RFC. URL: http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3864.txt
[RFC4627]
Douglas Crockford. The 'application/json' Media Type for JavaScript Object Notation (JSON). RFC. URL: http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4627.txt
[RFC6454]
Adam Barth. The Web Origin Concept. RFC. URL: http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc6454.txt
[RFC7034]
David Ross; Tobias Gondrom. HTTP Header Field X-Frame-Options. RFC. URL: http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc7034.txt
[RFC7230]
Roy T. Fielding; Julian F. Reschke. HTTP/1.1 Message Syntax and Routing. RFC. URL: http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc7230.txt
[RFC7231]
Roy T. Fielding; Julian F. Reschke. HTTP/1.1 Semantics and Content. RFC. URL: http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc7231.txt
[URI]
T. Berners-Lee; R. Fielding; L. Masinter. Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI): generic syntax. January 2005. URL: http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3986.txt
[WEBIDL]
Cameron McCormack. Web IDL. 19 April 2012. W3C Candidate Recommendation. (Work in progress.) URL: http://www.w3.org/TR/2012/CR-WebIDL-20120419/
[WEBSOCKETS]
Ian Hickson. The WebSocket API. 20 September 2012. W3C Candidate Recommendation. (Work in progress.) URL: http://www.w3.org/TR/2012/CR-websockets-20120920/
[WORKERS]
Ian Hickson. Web Workers. 1 May 2012. W3C Candidate Recommendation. (Work in progress.) URL: http://www.w3.org/TR/2012/CR-workers-20120501/
[XML11]
Eve Maler; et al. Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.1 (Second Edition). 16 August 2006. W3C Recommendation. URL: http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/REC-xml11-20060816
[XMLHTTPREQUEST]
Julian Aubourg; 송정기 (Jungkee Song); Hallvord R. M. Steen. XMLHttpRequest. 6 December 2012. W3C Working Draft. (Work in progress.) URL: http://www.w3.org/TR/2012/WD-XMLHttpRequest-20121206/
[XSLT]
James Clark. XSL Transformations (XSLT) Version 1.0. 16 November 1999. W3C Recommendation. URL: http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-xslt-19991116

Informative References

[RFC6797]
Jeff Hodges; Collin Jackson; Adam Barth. HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS). RFC. URL: http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc6797.txt
[UIREDRESS]
Giorgio Maone; et al. User Interface Security Directives for Content Security Policy. WD. URL: http://www.w3.org/TR/UISecurity/

Index