My Blog Now Has a Content Security Policy – Here’s How I’ve Done It

I’ve long been a proponent of Content Security Policies (CSPs). I’ve used them to fix mixed content warnings on this blog after Disqus made a little mistake, you’ll see one adorning Have I Been Pwned (HIBP) and I even wrote a dedicated Pluralsight course on browser security headers. I’m a fan (which is why I also recently joined Report URI), and if you’re running a website, you should be too.

But it’s not all roses with CSPs and that’s partly due to what browsers will and will not let you do and partly due to what the platforms running our websites will and will not let you do. For example, this blog runs on Ghost Pro which is a managed SaaS platform. I can upload whatever theme I like, but I can’t control many aspects of how the platform actually executes, including how it handles response headers which is how a CSP is normally served by a site. Now I’m enormously supportive of running on managed platforms, but this is one of the limitations of doing so. I also can’t add custom headers via Cloudflare at “the edge”; I’m serving the HSTS header from there because there’s first class support for that in the GUI, but not for CSP either specifically in the GUI or via custom response headers. This will be achievable in the future via Cloudflare workers but for now, they have to come from the origin site.

However, you can add a CSP via meta tag and indeed that’s what I originally did with the upgrade-insecure-requests implementation I mentioned earlier when I fixed the Disqus issue. However – and this is where we start getting into browser limitations – you can’t use the report-uri directive in a meta tag. Now that doesn’t matter if all the CSP is doing is upgrading requests, but it matters a lot if you’re actually blocking content. That’s where the real value proposition of a CSP lies too; in its ability to block things that may have been maliciously inserted into a site. I’ve had enough experience with breaking the CSP on HIBP to know that reporting is absolutely invaluable and indeed when I’ve not paid attention to reports in the past, it’s literally cost me money.

…