helmet

What is helmet?

Helmet is a middleware for Express applications that helps secure your apps by setting various HTTP headers. It's not a silver bullet, but it can help prevent some well-known web vulnerabilities by setting headers appropriately.

What are helmet's main functionalities?

Content Security Policy

Sets the Content-Security-Policy header to help prevent cross-site scripting attacks and other cross-site injections.

app.use(helmet.contentSecurityPolicy({
  directives: {
    defaultSrc: ["'self'"],
    scriptSrc: ["'self'", "https://trustedscripts.example.com"],
    objectSrc: ["'none'"],
    upgradeInsecureRequests: [],
  }
}));

X-DNS-Prefetch-Control

Controls browser DNS prefetching, which can improve user privacy at the expense of performance.

app.use(helmet.dnsPrefetchControl({ allow: false }));

Expect-CT

Sets the Expect-CT header which allows sites to opt in to reporting and/or enforcement of Certificate Transparency requirements.

app.use(helmet.expectCt({
  enforce: true,
  maxAge: 86400
}));

X-Frame-Options

Sets the X-Frame-Options header to control whether the browser should be allowed to render a page in a <frame>, <iframe>, <embed>, or <object>.

app.use(helmet.frameguard({ action: 'deny' }));

X-Powered-By

Removes the X-Powered-By header to make it slightly harder for attackers to see what potentially vulnerable technology powers your site.

app.use(helmet.hidePoweredBy());

Strict-Transport-Security

Sets the Strict-Transport-Security header to enforce secure (HTTP over SSL/TLS) connections to the server.

app.use(helmet.hsts({
  maxAge: 15552000,
  includeSubDomains: true
}));

X-Download-Options

Sets X-Download-Options for IE8+ to prevent others from embedding your site in an iframe.

app.use(helmet.ieNoOpen());

X-Content-Type-Options

Sets the X-Content-Type-Options header to prevent browsers from MIME-sniffing a response away from the declared content-type.

app.use(helmet.noSniff());

Referrer Policy

Sets the Referrer-Policy header to control what information is sent along with the requests.

app.use(helmet.referrerPolicy({ policy: 'no-referrer' }));

X-XSS-Protection

Sets the X-XSS-Protection header to enable the Cross-site scripting (XSS) filter in most recent web browsers.

app.use(helmet.xssFilter());

Other packages similar to helmet

lusca

Lusca is another security middleware for Express applications that offers a variety of security features such as CSRF protection, CSP, X-Frame options, and more. It is similar to Helmet but allows for more granular configuration of security policies.

cors

CORS is a package for providing a Connect/Express middleware that can be used to enable CORS (Cross-Origin Resource Sharing) with various options. While Helmet focuses on securing your app from various web vulnerabilities, CORS specifically provides middleware to enable CORS and manage cross-origin requests.

README

Express / Connect middleware that implement various security headers. [with sane defaults where applicable]

Included Middleware

• csp (Content Security Policy)
• xframe (X-FRAME-OPTIONS)

Basic Express Usage

    var helmet = require('helmet');

To use a particular middleware application wide just add it to your app configuration.

    app.configure(function(){
        app.use(express.methodOverride());
        app.use(express.bodyParser());
        app.use(helmet.csp());
        app.use(helmet.xframe());
        app.use(app.router);
    });

Content Security Policy

Content Security Policy (W3C Draft) <- Pretty much required reading if you want to do anything with CSP

Browser Support

Currently there is CSP support in Firefox and experimental support in Chrome. Both X-Content-Security-Policy and X-WebKit-CSP headers are set by helmet.

There are two different ways to build CSP policies with helmet.

Using policy()

policy() eats a json blob (including the output of it's own toJSON() function) to create a policy. By default helmet has a defaultPolicy that looks like;

Content-Security-Policy: default-src 'self'

To override this and create a new policy you could do something like

policy = {
  defaultPolicy: {
    'default-src': ["'self'"],
    'img-src': ['static.andyet.net','*.cdn.example.com'],
  }
}

helmet.csp.policy(policy);

Using add()

The same thing could be accomplished using add() since the defaultPolicy default-src is already 'self'

helmet.csp.add('img-src', ['static.andyet.net', '*.cdn.example.com']);

Reporting Violations

CSP can report violations back to a specified URL. You can either set the report-uri using policy() or add() or use the reportTo() helper function.

helmet.csp.reportTo('http://example.com/csp');

X-FRAME-OPTIONS

xFrame is a lot more straight forward than CSP. It has three modes. DENY, SAMEORIGIN, ALLOW-FROM. If your app does not need to be framed (and most don't) you can use the default DENY.

Browser Support

• IE8+
• Opera 10.50+
• Safari 4+
• Chrome 4.1.249.1042+
• Firefox 3.6.9 (or earlier with NoScript)

Here is an example for both SAMEORIGIN and ALLOW-FROM

helmet.xframe('sameorigin');

helmet.xframe('allow-from', 'http://example.com');

To Be Implemented

• HTTP Strict Transport Security
• X-XSS-Protection for IE
• Warn when self, unsafe-inline or unsafe-eval are not single quoted
• Warn when unsafe-inline or unsafe-eval are used
• Caching of generated CSP headers
• Device to capture and parse reported CSP violations