Sebastian Roth (CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security), Timothy Barron (Stony Brook University), Stefano Calzavara (Università Ca' Foscari Venezia), Nick Nikiforakis (Stony Brook University), Ben Stock (CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security)

The Content Security Policy (CSP) mechanism was developed as a mitigation against script injection attacks in 2010. In this paper, we leverage the unique vantage point of the Internet Archive to conduct a historical and longitudinal analysis of how CSP deployment has evolved for a set of 10,000 highly ranked domains. In doing so, we document the long-term struggle site operators face when trying to roll out CSP for content restriction and highlight that even seemingly secure whitelists can be bypassed through expired or typo domains. Next to these new insights, we also shed light on the usage of CSP for other use cases, in particular, TLS enforcement and framing control. Here, we find that CSP can be easily deployed to fit those security scenarios, but both lack wide-spread adoption. Specifically, while the underspecified and thus inconsistently implemented X-Frame-Options header is increasingly used on the Web, CSP's well-specified and secure alternative cannot keep up. To understand the reasons behind this, we run a notification campaign and subsequent survey, concluding that operators have often experienced the complexity of CSP (and given up), utterly unaware of the easy-to-deploy components of CSP. Hence, we find the complexity of secure, yet functional content restriction gives CSP a bad reputation, resulting in operators not leveraging its potential to secure a site against the non-original attack vectors.

View More Papers

Are You Going to Answer That? Measuring User Responses...

Imani N. Sherman (University of Florida), Jasmine D. Bowers (University of Florida), Keith McNamara Jr. (University of Florida), Juan E. Gilbert (University of Florida), Jaime Ruiz (University of Florida), Patrick Traynor (University of Florida)

Read More

A View from the Cockpit: Exploring Pilot Reactions to...

Matthew Smith (University of Oxford), Martin Strohmeier (University of Oxford), Jonathan Harman (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), Vincent Lenders (armasuisse Science and Technology), Ivan Martinovic (University of Oxford)

Read More

OmegaLog: High-Fidelity Attack Investigation via Transparent Multi-layer Log Analysis

Wajih Ul Hassan (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign), Mohammad A. Noureddine (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign), Pubali Datta (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign), Adam Bates (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)

Read More

On the Resilience of Biometric Authentication Systems against Random...

Benjamin Zi Hao Zhao (University of New South Wales and Data61 CSIRO), Hassan Jameel Asghar (Macquarie University and Data61 CSIRO), Mohamed Ali Kaafar (Macquarie University and Data61 CSIRO)

Read More