Disable Cache-Control Header field in custom ASP.NET HttpHandler response - asp.net

How can I completely supress the output of the Cache-Control Header that is returned by my custom HttpHandler in ASP.NET?
I know, I can change the header field by modifying response.Cache and response.Cache.SetCacheability, but that will only change the header field, not remove it. That is not what I want. I completely want to make no assumptions about the Cache-Control field and leave it up to the browsers policy.
EDIT: The same holds true for HttpResponse.Charset. If no charset is set, ASP.NET will always set it to "utf-8", although returning a header "Content-Type: text/html" without the charset parameter is perfectly valid html. Any idea how to supress the charset, too?

You can remove header values using
HttpContext.Current.Response.Headers.Remove("HEADER-VALUE-HERE");
If you are using a IIS7 integrated pipeline, however some header values are protected and cannot be removed (i.e they are injected after the response is dealt with on the most common page lifecycles).
What you can do if the above fails (ie its protected) is you can make a module to manually hook into the PreSendRequestHeaders and use the code above to remove the header at this point.
The majority of problems removing the header is not the inabillity to remove it, its to remove it at the correct time.
I believe using a custom http handler you should be able to remove it at the instantiation of the handler though.

I'm only guessing here, but I would think that this is configured within IIS -- on the website (or virtual directory)'s Properties dialog, there is a section called "Enable content expiration". Does unticking this box suppress the header?
If you don't have access to your IIS Manager, then I'm afraid I am not sure how you could suppress that header. Looking at the docs, response.Headers is a read-only property, so setting it to an empty string isn't going to work...

Related

Is Content-Security-Policy header applicable only for text/html Content-Type?

From the OWASP's website
https://cheatsheetseries.owasp.org/cheatsheets/Content_Security_Policy_Cheat_Sheet.html:
Send a Content-Security-Policy HTTP response header from your web server.
Content-Security-Policy: ...
Using a header is the preferred way and supports the full CSP feature set. Send it in all HTTP responses, not just the index page.
I don't understand how that could be true as it is possible to set the Content-Security-Policy by using a meta tag in the HTML.
I also don't see how the policy can apply to anything else but HTML pages.
Does anyone have idea why that statement above was made and if it is safe to only send HTTP header Content-Security-Policy for text/html responses?
By the way, the policy is too big and I would like to sent as fewer bytes as possible.
This is still something that’s not formally specified and there ai still some debate on this: https://github.com/w3c/webappsec/issues/520
In general there’s two arguments here:
On the one hand some other file types (XML, PDF, perhaps even SVGs) could benefit from CSP and any resource could become the page by right clicking and opening in a separate tab.
On the other hand CSPs can get quite big and are usually written for HTML pages. So a bit wasteful to send on other resources and most of it won’t be relevant.
The right answer (as suggested by above) is probably to have a reduced, and very strict, CSP for all non-HTML responses.
But I think for most people having it on the HTML only will be good enough and bring most of the benefits of CSP. Then again CSP is an advanced technique so if going as far as that, then why not do it properly?
Using a header is the preferred way and supports the full CSP feature set.
I don't understand how that could be true as it is possible to set the Content-Security-Policy by using a meta tag in the HTML.
Inside the meta tag are not supported the directives:
report-to and report-uri
frame-ansectors
sandox
Also meta tag does not support Content-Security-Policy-Report-Only feature, only the Content-Security-Policy.
All resources that start loading before meta tag in the HTML code are not affected by CSP. Malicious scripts can be injected as first item of the <head> section just before meta tags
The nonce-value is exposed in meta tag therefore can be easely stealing by script and reuse.
Using meta tag you can only set the CSP for HTML pages, but CSP is applied for XSLT in the XML pages, and for some other kinds of content (see below).
Therefore indeed an HTTP header is the preferred way to delivery CSP and using CSP via meta tag does not allow you to use full CSP feature set.
Send it in all HTTP responses, not just the index page.
I also don't see how the policy can apply to anything else but HTML pages.
The specification had in mind a little different - you should send CSP with any response page with HTML content, not only for 200 OK, but even for 404 Not found
403 Access Forbidden, etc.
Because these pages has access to cookie that can be steal in the page not covered by CSP.
CSP is applied not only to HTML pages, but to XSLT in XML-pages, to external javascripts files for workers (in Firefox). Also frame-ancestors directive of CSP HTTP header applies to any content (JPEG/GIF/PNG/PDF/MP4/etc) intended to be embedded into iframe, see the nitty-gritty here.

Defining a dynamic Content Security Policy in a Single Page Application

I want to define a content security policy that allows loading images from any origin by default but restricts this to allow only a specific set of origins in some sections of the website.
In a traditional website that makes a new HTTP request for every navigation, this could be easily done by sending a different Content-Security-Policy HTTP header for the pages that require the stricter policy. But in a single page application, this is of course not possible because navigating to a more restrictive section of the app does not cause a new HTTP request (also I would like to define policies on more dynamic conditions than a URL navigation).
I know that—besides in an HTTP header—CSP policies can also be defined in a meta tag and when multiple CSP policies are defined a request must pass all of them to be permitted. So my first approach to solving the problem was setting a default CSP in a Content-Security-Policy header for the entire page and then dynamically set more restrictive policies by adding a <meta http-equiv="Content-Security-Policy" content="…"> tag to the document's head when required.
And this works just fine for dynamically adding more restrictive policies. The big problem is that removing that meta tag or modifying it does not remove or modify the associated content security policy (tested in Chrome in Firefox). This behavior is defined in the W3C Content Security Policy spec:
Note: Modifications to the content attribute of a meta element after the element has been parsed will be ignored.
So is there any way to dynamically add (and more importantly also remove) a content security policy that does not rely on a HTTP navigation? I would like to avoid setting a restrictive image policy by default and then excepting individual images through hashes or nonces as this would be quite elaborate to implement.
In SPA you can each time to create a new fullscreen iframe and fill it by script. <iframe>, as nested browsing context, can have own CSP meta tag regardless of the parent page.
The parent page will contains only script to manage iframe's content, may be it's possible to use Worker() for this purpose.

X Frame options meta tag

i am getting this error on browser console when using following meta tag.
X-Frame-Options may only be set via an HTTP header sent along with a document. It may not be set inside <meta>.
this is the meta tag i'm using.
<meta http-equiv="X-Frame-Options" content="deny" />
can anybody tell me whats the cause, as this code is not written by me. how can i remove this error?
This error simply means that X-Frame-Options cannot be used in a meta tag. It only works when sent as a HTTP header. See https://developer.mozilla.org/fr/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/X-Frame-Options
Disregard the error, it is safe. If you need this feature, then you need to send the header along the response.
By the way, the same can easily be achieved with Javascript.
Blocks clickjacking attacks. XFrame Options

Is Content-Type HTTP header always required?

This question is about browser behavior as well as protocol specification for linking, importing, including or ajaxing css, js, image and other resources from within html, js or css files.
While testing static files and compressed content delivery in different browsers, I found that some browsers start behaving differently if you move away from conventions. For example, IE6 creates problem if you do not send Content-Disposition: inline; header for all inline css and js etc files, and a recent version of safari does not properly handle pre-compressed gzip CSS files if you use file extension .gz like in main-styles.css.gz.
My question is about the behavior of browsers about Content-Type response header. Since <link>, <script> and <img> tags already reasonably specify the content type of the resource, can this header be safely skipped, or do some browsers require it for some historical reason?
In short, no, it's not required. But it's recommended.
Most browser that I know of will treat <link>, <script>, and <img> properly if they are not sent with headers, but there's no real good reason not to send the headers. Basically, without Content-Type headers, the browser is left to try and guess based on the content.
From RFC2616:
Content-Type specifies the media type of the underlying data.
Content-Encoding may be used to indicate any additional content
codings applied to the data, usually for the purpose of data
compression, that are a property of the requested resource. There is
no default encoding.
Any HTTP/1.1 message containing an entity-body SHOULD include a
Content-Type header field defining the media type of that body. If
and only if the media type is not given by a Content-Type field, the
recipient MAY attempt to guess the media type via inspection of its
content and/or the name extension(s) of the URI used to identify the
resource. If the media type remains unknown, the recipient SHOULD
treat it as type "application/octet-stream".
Regarding the keyword SHOULD, specified in RFC2119:
SHOULD: This word, or the adjective "RECOMMENDED", mean that there
may exist valid reasons in particular circumstances to ignore a
particular item, but the full implications must be understood and
carefully weighed before choosing a different course.
It is required for backward compatibility.
For example: Internet Explorer 10 needs Content-Type:image/svg+xml in order to render any svg file
IE10, IE9 and probably other browsers always need the Content-Type header.
I ran into a problem in java where I tried to post some data via the library chrriis.dj.nativeswing.swtimpl.components.JWebBrowser, which basically displays an internet explorer inside a java program. But the simple php script on the back-end would not parse my post-data. (Used WebBrowserNavigationParameters to set post data while navigating to a certain page) I finally found out that the Content-Type header had to be set for php to properly paste the post-data. (This was not set by default.) Setting it to Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded and everything worked fine. So, I guess setting Content-Type should allways be done when POSTing data to php.

Umbraco - Check if request is XmlHttpRequest

I'm doing an AJAX feature for my Umbraco website.
Basically what I'm trying to do is when someone requests for http://mysite.com/news with the XmlHttpRequest header then I want Umbraco to return JSON of the following page.
What I've been trying to do is finding the right place to check for the header in Umbraco. Basically I want to override or inherit some class where I could check the header and return the page in Json or HTML depending on the header.
I'm using Umbraco 4.7.0 (1.0.4090.21631)
Any feedback would be more than welcome! Thanks!
I'd probably use the URL Rewriting module for IIS7 to detect the content-type in the request, then redirect to the same URL with /jsonTemplate on the end of it. You would then create a masterpage called jsonTemplate, with a single macro inside it, which would return your JSON.
This is common for Umbraco - specifying a separate template with a separate macro to return a different view of the same content. Check out http://blog4umbraco.codeplex.com/SourceControl/changeset/view/68424#1138733 for an example of an XSLT macro that returns RSS using this approach.
You should check the Content-Type header from server side logic. Your Javascript should be specifying a Content-Type like application/json.

Resources