Clickjacking Defense - OWASP Cheat Sheet Series (original) (raw)

Introduction

This cheat sheet is intended to provide guidance for developers on how to defend against Clickjacking, also known as UI redress attacks.

There are three main mechanisms that can be used to defend against these attacks:

Note that these mechanisms are all independent of each other, and where possible more than one of them should be implemented in order to provide defense in depth.

Defending with Content Security Policy (CSP) frame-ancestors directive

The frame-ancestors directive can be used in a Content-Security-Policy HTTP response header to indicate whether or not a browser should be allowed to render a page in a <frame> or <iframe>. Sites can use this to avoid Clickjacking attacks by ensuring that their content is not embedded into other sites.

frame-ancestors allows a site to authorize multiple domains using the normal Content Security Policy semantics.

Content-Security-Policy: frame-ancestors Examples

Common uses of CSP frame-ancestors:

Note that the single quotes are required around self and none, but may not occur around other source expressions.

See the following documentation for further details and more complex examples:

Limitations

X-Frame-Options takes priority: Section "Relation to X-Frame-Options" of the CSP Spec says: "If a resource is delivered with a policy that includes a directive named frame-ancestors and whose disposition is "enforce", then the X-Frame-Options header MUST be ignored", but older browser versions (e.g., Chrome 40 & Firefox 35) ignored this requirement and followed the X-Frame-Options header instead.

Browser Support

The following browsers support CSP frame-ancestors.

References:

The X-Frame-Options HTTP response header can be used to indicate whether or not a browser should be allowed to render a page in a <frame> or <iframe>. Sites can use this to avoid Clickjacking attacks, by ensuring that their content is not embedded into other sites. Set the X-Frame-Options header for all responses containing HTML content. The possible values are "DENY", "SAMEORIGIN", or "ALLOW-FROM uri"

There are three possible values for the X-Frame-Options header:

Browser Support

The following browsers support X-Frame-Options headers.

References:

Implementation

To implement this protection, you need to add the X-Frame-Options HTTP Response header to any page that you want to protect from being clickjacked via framebusting. One way to do this is to add the HTTP Response Header manually to every page. A possibly simpler way is to implement a filter that automatically adds the header to every page or to add it at Web Application Firewall of Web/Application Server level.

Common Defense Mistakes

Meta-tags that attempt to apply the X-Frame-Options directive DO NOT WORK. For example, <meta http-equiv="X-Frame-Options" content="deny"> will not work. You must apply the X-FRAME-OPTIONS directive as HTTP Response Header as described above.

Limitations

NestedFrames

Defending with SameSite Cookies

The SameSite cookie attribute defined in RFC 6265bis is primarily intended to defend against cross-site request forgery (CSRF); however it can also provide protection against Clickjacking attacks.

Cookies with a SameSite attribute of either strict or lax will not be included in requests made to a page within an <iframe>. This means that if the session cookies are marked as SameSite, any Clickjacking attack that requires the victim to be authenticated will not work, as the cookie will not be sent. An article on the Netsparker blog provides further details on which types of requests cookies are sent for with the different SameSite policies.

This approach is discussed on the JavaScript.info website.

Limitations

If the Clickjacking attack does not require the user to be authenticated, this attribute will not provide any protection.

Additionally, while SameSite attribute is supported by most modern browsers, there are still some users (approximately 6% as of November 2020) with browsers that do not support it.

The use of this attribute should be considered as part of a defence-in-depth approach, and it should not be relied upon as the sole protective measure against Clickjacking.

Best-for-now Legacy Browser Frame Breaking Script

One way to defend against clickjacking is to include a "frame-breaker" script in each page that should not be framed. The following methodology will prevent a webpage from being framed even in legacy browsers, that do not support the X-Frame-Options-Header.

In the document HEAD element, add the following:

First apply an ID to the style element itself:

<style id="antiClickjack"> body{display:none !important;} </style>

Then, delete that style by its ID immediately after in the script:

<script type="text/javascript"> if (self === top) { var antiClickjack = document.getElementById("antiClickjack"); antiClickjack.parentNode.removeChild(antiClickjack); } else { top.location = self.location; } </script>

This way, everything can be in the document HEAD and you only need one method/taglib in your API.

window.confirm() Protection

The use of X-Frame-Options or a frame-breaking script is a more fail-safe method of clickjacking protection. However, in scenarios where content must be frameable, then a window.confirm() can be used to help mitigate Clickjacking by informing the user of the action they are about to perform.

Invoking window.confirm() will display a popup that cannot be framed. If the window.confirm() originates from within an iframe with a different domain than the parent, then the dialog box will display what domain the window.confirm() originated from. In this scenario the browser is displaying the origin of the dialog box to help mitigate Clickjacking attacks. For example:

<script type="text/javascript"> var action_confirm = window.confirm("Are you sure you want to delete your youtube account?") if (action_confirm) { //... Perform action } else { //... The user does not want to perform the requested action.` } </script>

Insecure Non-Working Scripts DO NOT USE

Consider the following snippet which is NOT recommended for defending against clickjacking:

<script>if (top!=self) top.location.href=self.location.href</script>

This simple frame breaking script attempts to prevent the page from being incorporated into a frame or iframe by forcing the parent window to load the current frame's URL. Unfortunately, multiple ways of defeating this type of script have been made public. We outline some here.

Double Framing

Some frame busting techniques navigate to the correct page by assigning a value to parent.location. This works well if the victim page is framed by a single page. However, if the attacker encloses the victim in one frame inside another (a double frame), then accessing parent.location becomes a security violation in all popular browsers, due to the descendant frame navigation policy. This security violation disables the counter-action navigation.

Victim frame busting code:

if(top.location != self.location) { parent.location = self.location; }

Attacker top frame:

<iframe src="attacker2.html">

Attacker sub-frame:

<iframe src="http://www.victim.com">

The onBeforeUnload Event

A user can manually cancel any navigation request submitted by a framed page. To exploit this, the framing page registers an onBeforeUnload handler which is called whenever the framing page is about to be unloaded due to navigation. The handler function returns a string that becomes part of a prompt displayed to the user.

Say the attacker wants to frame PayPal. He registers an unload handler function that returns the string "Do you want to exit PayPal?". When this string is displayed to the user is likely to cancel the navigation, defeating PayPal's frame busting attempt.

The attacker mounts this attack by registering an unload event on the top page using the following code:

`

`

PayPal's frame busting code will generate a BeforeUnload event activating our function and prompting the user to cancel the navigation event.

No-Content Flushing

While the previous attack requires user interaction, the same attack can be done without prompting the user. Modern browsers enable an attacker to automatically cancel the incoming navigation request in an onBeforeUnload event handler by repeatedly submitting a navigation request to a site responding with "204 - No Content".

Navigating to a No Content site is effectively a NOP, but flushes the request pipeline, thus canceling the original navigation request. Here is sample code to do this:

var preventbust = 0 window.onbeforeunload = function() { killbust++ } setInterval( function() { if(killbust > 0){ killbust = 2; window.top.location = 'http://nocontent204.com' } }, 1);

<iframe src="http://www.victim.com">

Restricted zones

Most frame busting relies on JavaScript in the framed page to detect framing and bust itself out. If JavaScript is disabled in the context of the subframe, the frame busting code will not run. There are unfortunately several ways of restricting JavaScript in a subframe:

In Chrome:

<iframe src="http://www.victim.com" sandbox></iframe>

Firefox:

Activate designMode in parent page. While designMode is still supported in modern browsers, its effectiveness as a clickjacking attack vector may vary in current browser versions.

document.designMode = "on";