django-security

Django-Security

This package offers a number of models, views, middlewares and forms to facilitate security hardening of Django applications.

Full documentation

Automatically generated documentation of django-security is available on Read The Docs:

• Django-security documentation

Requirements

• Python >=3.12
• Django ~4.2

Installation

Install from Python packages repository:

pip install django-security

If you prefer the latest development version, install from django-security repository on GitHub:

git clone https://github.com/sdelements/django-security.git
cd django-security
poetry install

Adding to Django application's settings.py file:

INSTALLED_APPS = (
    ...
    'security',
    ...
)

Middleware modules can be added to MIDDLEWARE list in settings file:

MIDDLEWARE = (
    ...
    'security.middleware.LoginRequiredMiddleware',
    ...
)

Unlike the modules listed above, some other modules require configuration settings, fully described in django-security documentation. Brief description is provided below.

Middleware

Provided middleware modules will modify web application's output and input and in most cases requires no or minimum configuration.

Middleware	Description	Configuration
ClearSiteDataMiddleware	Send Clear-Site-Data header in HTTP response for any page that has been whitelisted. Recommended.	Required.
ContentSecurityPolicyMiddleware	Send Content Security Policy (CSP) header in HTTP response. Recommended, requires careful tuning.	Required.
LoginRequiredMiddleware	Requires a user to be authenticated to view any page on the site that hasn't been white listed.	Required.
MandatoryPasswordChangeMiddleware	Redirects any request from an authenticated user to the password change form if that user's password has expired.	Required.
NoConfidentialCachingMiddleware	Adds No-Cache and No-Store headers to confidential pages.	Required.
ReferrerPolicyMiddleware	Specify when the browser will set a `Referer` header.	Optional.
SessionExpiryPolicyMiddleware	Expire sessions on browser close, and on expiry times stored in the cookie itself.	Required.
ProfilingMiddleware	A simple middleware to capture useful profiling information in Django.	Optional.

Views

csp_report

View that allows reception of Content Security Policy violation reports sent by browsers in response to CSP header set by ``ContentSecurityPolicyMiddleware`. This should be used only if long term, continuous CSP report analysis is required. For one time CSP setup CspBuilder is much simpler.

This view can be configured to either log received reports or store them in database. See documentation for details.

require_ajax

A view decorator which ensures that the request being processed by view is an AJAX request. Example usage:

@require_ajax
def myview(request):
    ...

Models

CspReport

Content Security Policy violation report object. Only makes sense if ContentSecurityPolicyMiddleware and csp_report view are used. With this model, the reports can be then analysed in Django admin site.

PasswordExpiry

Associate a password expiry date with a user.

Logging

All django-security modules send important log messages to security facility. The application should configure a handler to receive them:

LOGGING = {
    ...
    'loggers': {
        'security': {
            'handlers': ['console',],
            'level': 'INFO',
            'propagate': False,
            'formatter': 'verbose',
        },
    },
    ...
}