How confident you feel that your JavaScript code is secured against the attackers? And why should you be concerned with it? When we look at modern web applications, one thing common is that they all use JavaScript. In some applications, JavaScript spreads its dominance contributing to the larger portion of code. One of the important properties of JavaScript is that the code we write executes in the user’s browser where we have limited access.

Though we have minimal control over the execution environment, it’s vital to ensure the security of JavaScript and have control over the execution happening there.

Do you know whether you can instruct the browser to comply with a set of guidelines and execute your JavaScript code?

After reading this article, you’ll come to know the common attributes of Content Security Policies and how you can use them to secure your JavaScript code at runtime.

Content Security Policy

Content Security Policy (CSP) is an added layer of security that helps to detect and mitigate certain types of attacks, including Cross Site Scripting (XSS) and data injection attacks. These attacks are used for everything from data theft to site defacement to distribution of malware.

As the name suggests, CSP is a set of instructions you can send with your JavaScript code to the browser to control its execution. For example, you can set up a CSP to restrict the execution of JavaScript to a set of whitelisted domains and ignore any inline scripts and event handlers to protect from XSS attacks. In addition, you can specify that all the scripts should load via HTTPS to reduce the risk of packet sniffing attacks.

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