Security HTTP Response Headers

Spring Security provides a default set of security related HTTP response headers to provide secure defaults.

The default for Spring Security is to include the following headers:

If the defaults do not meet your needs, you can easily remove, modify, or add headers from these defaults. For additional details on each of these headers, see the corresponding sections:

Spring Security’s default is to disable caching to protect the user’s content.

If a user authenticates to view sensitive information and then logs out, we do not want a malicious user to be able to click the back button to view the sensitive information. The cache control headers that are sent by default are:

To be secure by default, Spring Security adds these headers by default. However, if your application provides its own cache control headers, Spring Security backs out of the way. This allows for applications to ensure that static resources (such as CSS and JavaScript) can be cached.

Historically, browsers, including Internet Explorer, would try to guess the content type of a request by using content sniffing. This allowed browsers to improve the user experience by guessing the content type on resources that had not specified the content type. For example, if a browser encountered a JavaScript file that did not have the content type specified, it would be able to guess the content type and then run it.

The problem with content sniffing is that this allowed malicious users to use polyglots (that is, a file that is valid as multiple content types) to perform XSS attacks. For example, some sites may allow users to submit a valid postscript document to a website and view it. A malicious user might create a postscript document that is also a valid JavaScript file and perform an XSS attack with it.

By default, Spring Security disables content sniffing by adding the following header to HTTP responses:

When you type in your bank’s website, do you enter mybank.example.com or do you enter https://mybank.example.com? If you omit the https protocol, you are potentially vulnerable to Man-in-the-Middle attacks. Even if the website performs a redirect to https://mybank.example.com, a malicious user could intercept the initial HTTP request and manipulate the response (for example, redirect to https://mibank.example.com and steal their credentials).

Many users omit the https protocol, and this is why HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) was created. Once mybank.example.com is added as a HSTS host, a browser can know ahead of time that any request to mybank.example.com should be interpreted as https://mybank.example.com. This greatly reduces the possibility of a Man-in-the-Middle attack occurring.

One way for a site to be marked as a HSTS host is to have the host preloaded into the browser. Another way is to add the Strict-Transport-Security header to the response. For example, Spring Security’s default behavior is to add the following header, which instructs the browser to treat the domain as an HSTS host for a year (there are 31536000 seconds in a non-leap year):

The optional includeSubDomains directive instructs the browser that subdomains (such as secure.mybank.example.com) should also be treated as an HSTS domain.

The optional preload directive instructs the browser that the domain should be preloaded in browser as an HSTS domain. For more details on HSTS preload, see hstspreload.org.

HTTP Public Key Pinning (HPKP) specifies to a web client which public key to use with a certain web server to prevent Man-in-the-Middle (MITM) attacks with forged certificates. When used correctly, HPKP could add additional layers of protection against compromised certificates. However, due to the complexity of HPKP, many experts no longer recommend using it and Chrome has even removed support for it.

For additional details around why HPKP is no longer recommended, read Is HTTP Public Key Pinning Dead? and I’m giving up on HPKP.

Letting your website be added to a frame can be a security issue. For example, by using clever CSS styling, users could be tricked into clicking on something that they were not intending. For example, a user that is logged into their bank might click a button that grants access to other users. This sort of attack is known as Clickjacking.

There are a number ways to mitigate clickjacking attacks. For example, to protect legacy browsers from clickjacking attacks, you can use frame breaking code. While not perfect, the frame breaking code is the best you can do for the legacy browsers.

A more modern approach to address clickjacking is to use X-Frame-Options header. By default, Spring Security disables rendering pages within an iframe by using with the following header:

Some browsers have built-in support for filtering out reflected XSS attacks. The filter has been deprecated in major browsers, and current OWASP recommendation is to explicitly set the header to 0.

By default, Spring Security blocks the content by using the following header:

Content Security Policy (CSP) is a mechanism that web applications can use to mitigate content injection vulnerabilities, such as cross-site scripting (XSS). CSP is a declarative policy that provides a facility for web application authors to declare and ultimately inform the client (user-agent) about the sources from which the web application expects to load resources.

A web application can use CSP by including one of the following HTTP headers in the response:

Each of these headers are used as a mechanism to deliver a security policy to the client. A security policy contains a set of security policy directives, each responsible for declaring the restrictions for a particular resource representation.

For example, a web application can declare that it expects to load scripts from specific, trusted sources by including the following header in the response:

An attempt to load a script from another source other than what is declared in the script-src directive is blocked by the user-agent. Additionally, if the report-uri directive is declared in the security policy, the violation will be reported by the user-agent to the declared URL.

For example, if a web application violates the declared security policy, the following response header instructs the user-agent to send violation reports to the URL specified in the policy’s report-uri directive.

Violation reports are standard JSON structures that can be captured either by the web application’s own API or by a publicly hosted CSP violation reporting service, such as report-uri.io/.

The Content-Security-Policy-Report-Only header provides the capability for web application authors and administrators to monitor security policies rather than enforce them. This header is typically used when experimenting or developing security policies for a site. When a policy is deemed effective, it can be enforced by using the Content-Security-Policy header field instead.

Given the following response header, the policy declares that scripts can be loaded from one of two possible sources.

If the site violates this policy, by attempting to load a script from evil.example.com, the user-agent sends a violation report to the declared URL specified by the report-uri directive but still lets the violating resource load.

Applying Content Security Policy to a web application is often a non-trivial undertaking. The following resources may provide further assistance in developing effective security policies for your site:

An Introduction to Content Security Policy

CSP Guide - Mozilla Developer Network

W3C Candidate Recommendation

Referrer Policy is a mechanism that web applications can use to manage the referrer field, which contains the last page the user was on.

Spring Security’s approach is to use the Referrer Policy header, which provides different policies:

The Referrer-Policy response header instructs the browser to let the destination knows the source where the user was previously.

Feature Policy is a mechanism that lets web developers to selectively enable, disable, and modify the behavior of certain APIs and web features in the browser.

With Feature Policy, developers can opt-in to a set of “policies” for the browser to enforce on specific features used throughout your site. These policies restrict what APIs the site can access or modify the browser’s default behavior for certain features.

Permissions Policy is a mechanism that lets web developers selectively enable, disable, and modify the behavior of certain APIs and web features in the browser.

With Permissions Policy, developers can opt-in to a set of "policies" for the browser to enforce on specific features used throughout your site. These policies restrict what APIs the site can access or modify the browser’s default behavior for certain features.

Clear Site Data is a mechanism by which any browser-side data (cookies, local storage, and the like) can be removed when an HTTP response contains this header:

This is a nice clean-up action to perform on logout.

Spring Security has mechanisms to make it convenient to add the more common security headers to your application. However, it also provides hooks to enable adding custom headers.