Set Permission-Policy for Vue and NodeJS app - vue.js

I have an application that has a VueJs based front end and NodeJs based backend API. The client-side is a SPA and it communicates with API for getting data. Now in a security scan, it is mentioned that the app doesn't have a Permission-Policy HTTP header and I would like to add it. I but not sure is there any option I can add in the VueJS and I am confused whether this is something that needs to be added from the front end. From the Node app, it is possible to set the header, but here the pages are not generated from the server-side. It will be helpful if someone can let me know how can I add these headers to the app.

Technically you can publish Permissions-Policy header when you sent an initial SPA's HTML code (you have to use some packages or Node.js server facility to publish response header). Even more so scanners do not execute ajax and will not see the pages of your SPA.
But there are some doubts whether it is worth doing it at all.
Permissions Policy is a new name of Feature Policy, below I will use Feature Policy term, but all of the below also applies to Permissions Policy.
Browsers poorly support Feature Policy and do not support Permissions Policy. Only Chrome supports the interest-cohort directive, but you have to set specific flags to enable Permissions Policy support. Feature Policy / Permissions Policy spec still is under development.
Feature Policy is rarely published via HTTP header, because it is intended to restrict the capabilities of nested browsing contexts (iframes), and not the main page itself. Therefore it's mostly published via <iframe allow="..." attribute for each third-party iframe embedded.
But the scanners are not aware of this and do not check the allow= attribute.
Scanners don't know much about real security, they are more focused on visualization baubles like Grade A+ and labels with green/red color. Therefore scanners:
are not recognize Content Security Policy in meta tag, just in the HTTP header.
require X-Frame-Options header for any web page despite presence of CSP's frame-ancestors derictive and ignore fact that some sites are inbtended to be embedded (widgets, youtube/vimeo video etc.).
require Feature Policy / Permissions Policy header despite these are not supported or are published by another way.
Mostly scanners results have nothing with real security, all is how to get A+ grade, nothing else (see a relevant thread "headers manipulatin to get Grade A+").
Of course, scanners can draw your attention to some overlooked headlines, but final decision which headers do web-app need to publish is up to you.

Related

Enforce Content Security Policy on old browsers

I'm currently testing out some content security policies for my React project. I am using a web config to add the custom headers as I'm hosting in IIS.
This all works well in Chrome etc but doesn't have any effect in older browsers such as IE11, as they don't support 99% of CSPs
What is the point if I can just bypass CSPs by using an old browser? Or am I missing some way of enforcing these rules, even for old browsers?
The purpose of CSPs is not to protect against malicious browser users, it's to protect against malicious or buggy websites. (This article has some example attacks that CSPs are designed to mitigate.) Such attackers have no control over what browser a given person uses, so they can't use old browsers to "bypass" CSP protections.
"bypass CSPs" does not means that somebody can hack your web page. It just means that user used obsolete browser is vulnerable to XSS (XSS it's a third-party action). It's user's decision, and you cen do nothing. Also users can use some browsers plugins to remove the CSP header with the same result in modern browsers.
However you can do you best to protect even users with obsolete browsers. Additionally to CSP header, use X-XSS-Protection header, IE supports it since IE 8.
Additionally you can publish X-Frame-Options header to prevent clickjacking, IE supports it.
But if your application works with some sensitive/financial data, perhaps the best solution is to prohibit the use of outdated browsers or warn the visitor that he is using an outdated browser and bears all responsibility of that.

"cross domain javascript source file inclusion" reported by OWASP ZAP for trusted resource

My host is www.example.com and I'm serving html pages with URL www.example.com/html-url.html.
In these htmls I have included a javascript file from our S3 bucket say bucket-name.
The OWASP ZAP scan is raising a low level alert for this - Cross-Domain JavaScript Source File Inclusion
Evidence: <script src="bucket-name/custom.js" type="text/javascript"/>
Question: Is there any way that I can configure a list of trusted resources/URLs in configuration? I'm using NGINX server.
Please note that, for some reasons I need to get a clean vulnerability scan report.
I understand that there is this HTTP header "Content Security Policy" and on the official site it says "Content Security Policy (CSP) is an HTTP header that allows site operators fine-grained control over where resources on their site can be loaded from."
But I'm not sure if I can make use of this.
You can delegate custom domain name for S3 bucket, for example subdomain cdn.example.com to avoid Cross-Domain JavaScript Source File.
I do not know what is "under the hood" of OWASP ZAP and is it possible to influence on OWASP ZAP alert above with CSP header, but CSP definitely should give additional points to security.
A "clean vulnerability scan report" is desirable but I personally dont think it should be mandatory - web scanners report potential vulnerabilities so some may be false positives or even true positives that are not actually relevant for your situation.
In any case "bucket-name/custom.js" is not cross domain so this looks like a false positive. Have you updated ZAP? If so please raise this as an ZAP issue and we can fix it: https://github.com/zaproxy/zaproxy/issues

Is it possible to have GitHub Readme images follow redirects?

I'm trying to add a test coverage badge to the Readme of a private repository on GitHub. Our continuous integration process saves out the image to a secured Google Cloud Storage bucket that's not accessible to the public, and should remain that way.
Google's authorization layer is smart enough that if I go to the URL for the image, I'm automatically redirected to the resource with a valid auto-generated signed URL.
E.g., if I go to http://storage.cloud.google.com/secret-files/mysecretfile.png, then if I'm logged in and allowed to view it, I'm automatically redirected to something like https://blahblah-apidata.googleusercontent.com/download/storage/v1/b/secret-files/o/mysecretfile.png?key=verylongkey, where I can load the image.
This seemed perfect. Reference the canonical path in the GitHub Readme, authenticated users see the image, unauthenticated users are still blocked, we don't have to make the file public, and we don't have to do anything complicated.
Except that GitHub is proxying the image request, meaning that it will always be unauthenticated. My browser is loading something like https://camo.githubusercontent.com/mysecretimage.png.
Is there a clever way to work around this? Or do I need to go back to the drawing board?
All images on github.com are proxied using the Camo image proxy. There are a couple reasons for this:
It preserves the privacy of users. It isn't possible for a document to track users by directing them to a different site or using cookies to track them.
It means images can be cached and served at an appropriate size.
GitHub can have a very strict content security policy that does not allow loading from untrusted sites, which means that any sort of accidental security problem (like an XSS) is a lot less likely to work.
Note the last part. Even if you found some sneaky way to get another image URL to render properly in the website, your browser wouldn't load it because it violates the Content-Security-Policy header the site sent, and moreover, your browser would tattle about that to the reporting URL that GitHub provided.
So any image URL you provide will need to be readable by GitHub's image proxy and it won't be possible to serve different content to different users.

Brave browser support of Google API HTTP Referrer option

I'm using a Google API (e.g., for Maps Embed) with a key that is restricted via a list of HTTP Referrers. In this case, the map is embedded in my.site.com, so within the Google API -> Credentials page, I allow access for referrer .site.com/. When I visit my.site.com from most browsers, Google maps displays correctly as the browser sets the referrer field to my.site.com. When using the Brave browser, however, it sets the referrer field to the origin and displays an error:
Request received from IP address 98.229.177.122, with referrer: https://www.google.com/
Of course I could add google.com to the list of allowed referrers, but that defeats the purpose of limiting the use of the API key to my own website - anyone could "borrow" the API key, add it to their site for the same API, and anyone using Brave would be able to access the feature. Now that each access costs $, I'd rather not do this. Any ideas for a work-around?
Note: #geocodezip - thanks for the reference. Indeed, I forgot to add that when I set the site-specific shield to "All cookies allowed", or even completely turn shields off for the site, the behavior is still the same (error). However, in the default shield settings, when I set the cookies field to "All cookies allowed", then it works as intended (maps are displayed), even though for the default settings section it states:
These are the default Shields settings. They apply to all websites
unless you change something in the Shields panel on a particular site.
Changing these won't affect your existing per-site settings.
which I interpret to mean that the site-specific settings take precedence over the defaults.
So I'm thinking this (site-specific cookies setting not over-riding the default) is a brave bug, though that is a bit separate from my initial hope for a different approach that didn't require manual intervention on the user's part.

Can you modify http request headers in a Safari extension?

I can do this in FF and IE, and I know it doesn't exist in Chrome yet. Anybody know if you can do this in a Safari plugin? I can't find anything that says one way or another in the documentation.
Edit (November 2021): as pointed out in the comments, ParosProxy seems to no longer exist (and was last released ~2006 from what I can see). There are more modern options for debugging on Mac (outside of browser plugins on non-Safari browsers) like Proxyman. Rather than adding another list of links that might expire, I'll instead advise people to search for "debugging proxy" on their platform of choice instead.
Original Answer (2012):
The Safari "Develop" menu in advanced preferences allows you to partially customize headers (like the user agent), but it is quite limited.
However, if a particular browser or app does not allow you to alter the headers, just take it out of the equation. You can use things like Fiddler or ParosProxy (and many others) to alter the requests regardless of the application sending the request.
They also have the advantage of allowing you to make sure that you are sending the same headers regardless of the application in question and (depending on your requirements) potentially work across multiple browsers and apps without modification.
Safari has added extension support but its APIs don't let you have granular level control over Request & Response as compared to Chrome/Firefox/Edge.
To have granular level control over your Request and Response, you need setup a system wide proxy instead.
Requestly Desktop App automatically does this for you and on top of that, you can do various types of modifications too like:
Modify Request/Response Headers
Redirect URLs
Modify Response
Delay Network request
Insert Custom Scripts
Change User-Agent
Here's an article about header modification using requestly
https://requestly.io/feature/modify-request-response-headers/
Disclaimer: I work at Requestly