What is ienoopen?
The ienoopen npm package is a middleware for Express.js that sets the X-Download-Options header to 'noopen' to prevent Internet Explorer from executing downloads in your site's context. This is a security measure to mitigate certain types of attacks.
What are ienoopen's main functionalities?
Set X-Download-Options header
This feature sets the X-Download-Options header to 'noopen' for all responses, which helps prevent Internet Explorer from executing downloads in your site's context. The code sample demonstrates how to integrate the ienoopen middleware into an Express.js application.
const express = require('express');
const ienoopen = require('ienoopen');
const app = express();
// Use ienoopen middleware
app.use(ienoopen());
app.get('/', (req, res) => {
res.send('Hello, world!');
});
app.listen(3000, () => {
console.log('Server is running on port 3000');
});
Other packages similar to ienoopen
helmet
Helmet is a comprehensive security middleware for Express.js that helps secure your app by setting various HTTP headers. It includes a similar functionality to ienoopen through its `ienoopen` middleware, but also provides additional security features such as setting Content Security Policy, XSS protection, and more.
lusca
Lusca is another security middleware for Express.js that provides various security features, including setting the X-Download-Options header to 'noopen'. It offers a broader range of security measures similar to Helmet, such as CSRF protection, XSS protection, and more.
X-Download-Options middleware
This middleware sets the X-Download-Options
header to noopen
to prevent Internet Explorer users from executing downloads in your site's context.
const ienoopen = require("ienoopen");
app.use(ienoopen());
Some web applications will serve untrusted HTML for download. By default, some versions of IE will allow you to open those HTML files in the context of your site, which means that an untrusted HTML page could start doing bad things in the context of your pages. For more, see this MSDN blog post.
This is pretty obscure, fixing a small bug on IE only. No real drawbacks other than performance/bandwidth of setting the headers, though.