HN Explorer

19 comments

[ 0.29 ms ] story [ 20.6 ms ] thread
n4pw01f
Nice work! You gave me something to fix!!
tumdum_
Sadly non of it was written by a human being.
rackcrunch
Fair. The study is backed by a human being who stands behind every number. And absolutely, use whatever tool you like.
aetherspawn
It’s ridiculous that the answer to a secure web is for everyone to sprinkle the magic salt and not something on the browser side
alserio
we'd need an epoch like reset to good defaults
aetherspawn
For important issues like security - just break the web, it will adjust.
sublinear
PoC? HN would be a great place to show one.
rackcrunch
Referrer-Policy shows it can work. When the header is missing, browsers fall back to strict-origin-when-cross-origin. 86.6% of the sites we scanned don't send it, and we didn't count that as a failure for that reason. The other headers don't have a safe default like that yet.
axospaxos
That sounds more like it is a condemnation of all these other headers that can't work for 86.6% of sites by requiring nothing.
stargrazer
So.. you've written up what you checked, and what didn't match what ever criteria you had.

But.. what does it mean? Why enforce certain headers? Why enforce certain options? There is a section which kinda looks at this, but not really.

You have a bunch of links at the end for resources, but why not just provide the rationale for each rule or option inclusion in the article as well? What does each prevent or allow and why?

fitsumbelay
for static sites on a VPS it's fair to expect the host to provision these, yes?
aetherspawn
No, not for a VPS. They are configured at the web server. If you mean CDN, you might be able to use a _headers file or similar to add. Cloudflare can definitely do it.
wink
for static sites... it's not that I would call them useless, but most are just not very critical. Clickjacking and any cookie attacks on a site without cookies is pretty useless most of the time.