Pete FreitagFirefox 3.5 Introduces Origin Header, Security Features
By Pete Freitag
FireFox 3.5 was just released about a half hour ago. You can checkout all the new features for web developers here.
For me, as someone that does a lot of security research one of the most interesting new features is the Origin http header that FireFox 3.5 now sends. The Origin header when your browser makes a request the following types of requests: scripts, stylesheets, form GET & form POST, redirects, XMLHttpRequest (XHR, ajax), and frames.
You may be thinking, ok how is this different than the HTTP Referrer header. First, it only sends the domain name of the page, and second it doesn't have many privacy concerns (so hopefully people won't turn it off).
So how can this improve security?
Web Servers can block requests that send invalid Origin headers, this will mitigate the risk of cross site request forgeries (CSRF), including JSON hijacking for people using browsers that support this feature.
You can read more about the origin header here.
Firefox 3.5 Introduces Origin Header, Security Features was first published on June 30, 2009.
If you like reading about firefox, origin, header, http, security, csrf, json, or ajax then you might also like:
- Ajax Same Origin Policy No More with Firefox 3.5
- Firefox Now Supports HttpOnly Cookies
- csrfVerifyToken does not invalidate the token
- Firefox Aurora now Supports Content Security Policy 1.0
Weekly Security Advisories Email
Advisory Week is a new weekly email containing security advisories published by major software vendors (Adobe, Apple, Microsoft, etc).
I have been working with this and am having a lot of trouble with pre-flighted requests. The reason being is that the preflighted request first sends a request to the server (via the OPTIONS method) and expects headers back that indicate if the request can continue. But I can not get IIS6 to pass the OPTIONS request to Cold Fusion.
Have you tried this? The only way I could get it to work was configure the headings in IIS. But thats no good since they are being returned on every request, and I want to use CF to do some verification of the request origin etc. Any ideas?