Content Security Policies

We are finding Content Security Policies to be a helpful addition to our security toolkit when dealing with websites that pull assets from mixed contexts. The policy defines a set of rules about where assets can come from (and whether to allow inline script tags). The browser then refuses to load or execute JavaScript, CSS or images that violate those rules. When used in conjunction with good practices, such as output encoding, it provides good mitigation for XSS attacks. Interestingly, the optional endpoint for posting JSON reports of violations is how Twitter discovered that ISPs were injecting HTML or JavaScript into their pages.