HTTP Strict Transport Security

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1 Description
2 Examples
3 Excessively Strict STS
4 Browser Support
5 Server Side
- 5.1 IIS
6 Threats
7 Links

Description

HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) is an opt-in security enhancement that is specified by a web application through the use of a special response header. Once a supported browser receives this header that browser will prevent any communications from being sent over HTTP to the specified domain and will instead send all communications over HTTPS. It also prevents HTTPS click through prompts on browsers.

The specification has been released and published end of 2012 as RFC 6797 (HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS)) by the IETF. (Reference see in the links at the bottom.)

Examples

Example of the HTTP strict transport security header

 Strict-Transport-Security: max-age=31536000

If all subdomains are HTTPS too then the following header is applicable:

 Strict-Transport-Security: max-age=31536000; includeSubDomains

Excessively Strict STS

Use caution when setting excessively strict STS policies. Including subdomains should only be used in environments where all sites within your organization for the given domain name require ssl. Max-age limits should be carefully considered as infrequent visitors may find your site inaccessible if you relax your policy.

Browser Support

Browser	Support Introduced
Internet Explorer	support expected starting with ie12[1]
Firefox	4
Opera	12
Safari	Mavericks (Mac OS X 10.9)
Chrome	4.0.211.0

A detailed overview of supporting browsers can be found at canisue.com.

Server Side

The web server side needs to inject the HSTS header.

For HTTP sites on the same domain it is not recommended to add a HSTS header but to do a permanent redirect (301 status code) to the HTTPS site.

An Apache HTTPd example that will permanently redirect a URL to the identical URL with a HTTPS scheme, is as follows:

<VirtualHost *:80>
       ServerAlias *
       RewriteEngine On
       RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://%{HTTP_HOST}$1 [redirect=301]
</VirtualHost>

On the HTTPS site configuration the following is needed to add the header as recommended by the standard:

       Header set Strict-Transport-Security "max-age=31536000; includeSubDomains"

The following links show how to set response headers in other web servers:

IIS

Whilst custom headers can be configured in IIS without any extensions, it is not possible to restrict these headers to secure transport channels as per the HSTS specification. HSTS has been implemented as per the specification as an open source IIS module.

Threats

HSTS addresses the following threats:

User bookmarks or manually types http://example.com and is subject to a man-in-the-middle attacker
- HSTS automatically redirects HTTP requests to HTTPS for the target domain
Web application that is intended to be purely HTTPS inadvertently contains HTTP links or serves content over HTTP
- HSTS automatically redirects HTTP requests to HTTPS for the target domain
A man-in-the-middle attacker attempts to intercept traffic from a victim user using an invalid certificate and hopes the user will accept the bad certificate
- HSTS does not allow a user to override the invalid certificate message