I need to be able to set the Access-Control-Allow-Origin response header with my server, however when I switch to Under Attack Mode (which I need right now because I'm being DDOSed), Cloudflare scrubs this and a bunch of other headers which is breaking some site functionality I need.
I sent a message to Cloudflare and am waiting to hear back, any ideas in the meantime?
The question is almost in the title itself. If I had an app and use includeSubdomains for the HSTS header but have no subdomains at all, is this considered good or bad?
It is good.
If you plan on submitting your site to Google's HSTS Preload list, you will need to have the includeSubdomains directive even if you have no subdomains.
If you ever plan on having a subdomain, it'll mean that you will need to set it up to support HTTPS from Day 1. I'm considering this as a good thing as it is a plus for security.
It's good.
Let's say you have https://example.com and that's all you use. HSTS ensures you can only use HTTPS on this domain. This prevents downgrade attacks.
Without includeSubDomain, an attacker could set up and use a fake subdomain like http://www.example.com or http://secure.example.com or http://anyotherlegitimatssounsingsubdomain.example.com and swerve them over http and get people somehow to go there instead of https://example.com. Of course this requires access to manipulate the DNS of the victim but that's possible through certain techniques.
As it's a subdomain of your main domain it will look legitimate (though won't have https) and can also potentially leak or override cookies for the main domain.
Just because YOU don't use a subdomain doesn't mean your users know that.
For an app this is perhaps less critical as the URL will be set on the app and more difficult to change, and they typically don't use cookies, but it's still considered best practice to use includeSubDomain.
I have a website (userbob.com) that normally serves all pages as https. However, I am trying to have one subdirectory (userbob.com/tools/) always serve content as http. Currently, it seems like Chrome's HSTS feature (which I don't understand how it works) is forcing my site's pages to load over https. I can go to chrome://net-internals/#hsts and delete my domain from Chrome's HSTS set, and the next query will work as I want without redirecting to an https version. However, if I try to load the page a second time, it ends up redirecting again. The only way I can get it to work is if I go to chrome://net-internals/#hsts and delete my domain from Chrome's HSTS set after each request. How do I let browsers know that I want all my pages from userbob.com/tools/ to load as http? My site uses an apache/tomcat web server.
(Just FYI, the reason I want the pages in the tools directory to serve pages over http instead of https is because some of them are meant to iframe http pages. If I try to iframe an http page from an https page I end up getting mixed-content errors.)
HTTP Strict Transport Security (or HSTS) is a setting your site can send to browsers which says "I only want to use HTTPS on my site - if someone tries to go to a HTTP link, automatically upgrade them to HTTPS before you send the request". It basically won't allow you to send any HTTP traffic, either accidentally or intentionally.
This is a security feature. HTTP traffic can be intercepted, read, altered and redirected to other domains. HTTPS-only websites should redirect HTTP traffic to HTTPS, but there are various security issues/attacks if any requests are still initially sent over HTTP so HSTS prevents this.
The way HSTS works is that your website sends a HTTP Header Strict-Transport-Security with a value of, for example, max-age=31536000; includeSubDomains on your HTTPS requests. The browser caches this and activates HSTS for 31536000 seconds (1 year), in this example. You can see this HTTP Header in your browsers web developer tools or by using a site like https://securityheaders.io . By using the chrome://net-internals/#hsts site you are able to clear that cache and allow HTTP traffic again. However as soon as you visit the site over HTTPS it will send the Header again and the browser will revert back to HTTPS-only.
So to permanently remove this setting you need to stop sending that Strict-Transport-Security Header. Find this in your Apache/Tomcat server and turn it off. Or better yet change it to max-age=0; includeSubDomains for a while first (which tells the browser to clear the cache after 0 seconds and so turns it off without having to visit chrome://net-internals/#hsts, as long as you visit the site over HTTPS to pick up this Header, and then remove the Header completely later.
Once you turn off HSTS you can revert back to having some pages on HTTPS and some on HTTP with standard redirects.
However it would be remiss of me to not warn you against going back to HTTP. HTTPS is the new standard and there is a general push to encourage all sites to move to HTTPS and penalise those that do not. Read his post for more information:
https://www.troyhunt.com/life-is-about-to-get-harder-for-websites-without-https/
While you are correct that you cannot frame HTTP content on a HTTPS page, you should consider if there is another way to address this problem. A single HTTP page on your site can cause security problems like leaking cookies (if they are not set up correctly). Plus frames are horrible and shouldn't be used anymore :-)
You can use rewrite rules to redirect https requests to http inside of subdirectory. Create an .htaccess file inside tools directory and add the following content:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} on
RewriteRule (.*) http://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L]
Make sure that apache mod_rewrite is enabled.
Basically any HTTP 301 response from an HTTPS request indicating a target redirect to HTTP should never be honored at all by any browser, those servers doing that are clearly violating basic security, or are severaly compromized.
However a 301 reply to an HTTPS request can still redirect to another HTTPS target (including on another domain, provided that other CORS requirements are met).
If you navigate an HTTPS link (or a javascript event handler) and the browser starts loading that HTTPS target which replies with 301 redirect to HTTP, the behavior of the browser should be like if it was a 500 server error, or a connection failure (DNS name not resolved, server not responding timeout).
Such server-side redirect are clearly invalid. And website admins should never do that ! If they want to close a service and inform HTTPS users that the service is hosted elsewhere and no longer secure, they MUST return a valid HTTPS response page with NO redirect at all, and this should really be a 4xx error page (most probably 404 PAGE NOT FOUND) and they should not redirect to another HTTPS service (e.g. a third-party hosted search engine or parking page) which does not respect CORS requirements, or sends false media-types (it is acceptable to not honor the requested language and display that page in another language).
Browsers that implement HSTS are perfectly correct and going to the right direction. But I really think that CORS specifications are a mess, just tweaked to still allow advertizing network to host and control themselves the ads they broadcast to other websites.
I strongly think that serious websites that still want to display ads (or any tracker for audience measurement) for valid reasons can host these ads/trackers themselves, on their own domain and in the same protocol: servers can still get themselves the ads content they want to broadcast by downloading/refreshing these ads themselves and maintaining their own local cache. They can track their audience themselves by collecting the data they need and want and filtering it on their own server if they want this data to be analysed by a third party: websites will have to seriously implement thelselves the privacy requirements.
I hate now those too many websites that, when visited, are being tracked by dozens of third parties, including very intrusive ones like Facebook and most advertizing networks, plus many very weak third party services that have very poor quality/security and send very bad content they never control (including fake ads, fake news, promoting illegal activities, illegal businesses, invalid age rating...).
Let's return to the origin of the web: one site, one domain, one third party. This does not mean that they cannot link to other third party sites, but these must done only with an explicit user action (tapping or clicking), and visitors MUST be able to kn ow wherre this will go to, or which content will be displayed.
This is even possible for inserting videos (e.g. Youtube) in news articles: the news website can host themselves a cache of static images for the frame and icons for the "play" button: when users click that icon, it will start activating the third party video, and in that case the thirf party will interact directly with that user and can collect other data. But the unactivated contents will be tracked only by the origin website, under their own published policy.
In my local development environment I use apache server. What worked for me was :
Open you config file in sites-availabe/yoursite.conf. then add the following line inside your virtualhost:
Header always set Strict-Transport-Security "max-age=0". Restart your server.
I have (hopefully) set apache to issue an STS header for all HTTPS traffic as described in How to set HSTS header from .htaccess only on HTTPS
I was hoping to be able to verify that this was working by looking at the response header in chrome dev tools but there doesn't seem to be anything in there related to it:
Is there a way to check that this is functioning correctly? Any help much appreciated.
You can check this is working correctly by looking for the strict-transport-security header in the response headers (in the dev tools where you have taken your screenshot).
If you try the same request you've made with the dev tools with https://accounts.google.com/, for example, you should see an entry like this:
strict-transport-security:max-age=10893354; includeSubDomains
You were already on the right track, but there's probably something wrong with the way you've configured your server.
So we have a foreign site that's pulling in a cookie and login widget from our domestic site. Since the foreign site is .de, but our domestic site is .com it treats our login widget request as a third party cookie. To get around this we're using mod_header in apache 2.2 which works, but it's being set on every request. We'd like to find a way for it to only be set on responses that are setting cookies. Below is what we have currently. Is there any way to narrow it down?
Header set P3P 'CP="This is not a P3P policy! See our privacy statement here http://www.example.com/example/cms/lang/en/site/products/home/privacy-statement"
I think you actually need to set up this header on every resource on your external iframe
look here . This resolved the problem I had with P3P also