Security headers on 4,688 small-business websites: 49.7% met none of 7 criteria

18 pointsposted 10 hours ago
by terrybyte
(rackcrunch.com)

17 Comments

stargrazer

9 hours ago

So.. you've written up what you checked, and what didn't match what ever criteria you had.

But.. what does it mean? Why enforce certain headers? Why enforce certain options? There is a section which kinda looks at this, but not really.

You have a bunch of links at the end for resources, but why not just provide the rationale for each rule or option inclusion in the article as well? What does each prevent or allow and why?

aetherspawn

10 hours ago

It’s ridiculous that the answer to a secure web is for everyone to sprinkle the magic salt and not something on the browser side

rackcrunch

9 hours ago

Referrer-Policy shows it can work. When the header is missing, browsers fall back to strict-origin-when-cross-origin. 86.6% of the sites we scanned don't send it, and we didn't count that as a failure for that reason. The other headers don't have a safe default like that yet.

axospaxos

9 hours ago

That sounds more like it is a condemnation of all these other headers that can't work for 86.6% of sites by requiring nothing.

alserio

9 hours ago

we'd need an epoch like reset to good defaults

aetherspawn

9 hours ago

For important issues like security - just break the web, it will adjust.

sublinear

8 hours ago

PoC? HN would be a great place to show one.

n4pw01f

10 hours ago

Nice work! You gave me something to fix!!

tumdum_

10 hours ago

Sadly non of it was written by a human being.

rackcrunch

9 hours ago

Fair. The study is backed by a human being who stands behind every number. And absolutely, use whatever tool you like.

fitsumbelay

9 hours ago

for static sites on a VPS it's fair to expect the host to provision these, yes?

aetherspawn

7 hours ago

No, not for a VPS. They are configured at the web server. If you mean CDN, you might be able to use a _headers file or similar to add. Cloudflare can definitely do it.