Semantics-Based Analysis of Content Security Policy Deployment

Abstract

Content Security Policy (CSP) is a recent W3C standard introduced to prevent and mitigate the impact of content injection vulnerabilities on websites. In this article, we introduce a formal semantics for the latest stable version of the standard, CSP Level 2. We then perform a systematic, large-scale analysis of the effectiveness of the current CSP deployment, using the formal semantics to substantiate our methodology and to assess the impact of the detected issues. We focus on four key aspects that affect the effectiveness of CSP: browser support, website adoption, correct configuration, and constant maintenance. Our analysis shows that browser support for CSP is largely satisfactory, with the exception of a few notable issues. However, there are several shortcomings relative to the other three aspects. CSP appears to have a rather limited deployment as yet and, more crucially, existing policies exhibit a number of weaknesses and misconfiguration errors. Moreover, content security policies are not regularly updated to ban insecure practices and remove unintended security violations. We argue that many of these problems can be fixed by better exploiting the monitoring facilities of CSP, while other issues deserve additional research, being more rooted into the CSP design.