CSP: report-uri

Deprecated: This feature is no longer recommended. Though some browsers might still support it, it may have already been removed from the relevant web standards, may be in the process of being dropped, or may only be kept for compatibility purposes. Avoid using it, and update existing code if possible; see the compatibility table at the bottom of this page to guide your decision. Be aware that this feature may cease to work at any time.

Warning: The report-to directive is intended to replace report-uri, and in browsers that support report-to, the report-uri directive is ignored.

However until report-to is broadly supported you can specify both headers as shown:

http
Content-Security-Policy: …; report-uri https://endpoint.example.com; report-to endpoint_name

The deprecated HTTP Content-Security-Policy (CSP) report-uri directive instructs the user agent to report attempts to violate the Content Security Policy. These violation reports consist of JSON documents sent via an HTTP POST request to the specified URI.

The directive has no effect in and of itself, but only gains meaning in combination with other directives.

CSP version 1
Directive type Reporting directive
This directive is not supported in the <meta> element.

Syntax

http
Content-Security-Policy: report-uri <uri>;
Content-Security-Policy: report-uri <uri> <uri>;
<uri>

A URI indicating where the report must be sent.

Violation report syntax

The report JSON object is sent via an HTTP POST operation with a Content-Type of application/csp-report.

Note: Violation reports should be considered attacker-controlled data. The content should be properly sanitized before storing or rendering. This is particularly true of the script-sample property, if supplied.

The report JSON object has a single top-level property, "csp-report", which contains an object with the following properties:

blocked-uri

The URI of the resource that was blocked from loading by the Content Security Policy. If the blocked URI is from a different origin than the document-uri, then the blocked URI is truncated to contain just the scheme, host, and port.

disposition

Either "enforce" or "report" depending on whether the Content-Security-Policy-Report-Only header or the Content-Security-Policy header is used.

document-uri

The URI of the document in which the violation occurred.

effective-directive

The directive whose enforcement caused the violation. Some browsers may provide different values, such as Chrome providing style-src-elem/style-src-attr, even when the enforced directive was style-src.

original-policy

The original policy as specified by the Content-Security-Policy HTTP header.

referrer

The referrer of the document in which the violation occurred.

script-sample

The first 40 characters of the inline script, event handler, or style that caused the violation. Violations originating from external files are not included in the report.

This is only applicable to script-src* and style-src* violations, when the corresponding Content-Security-Policy directive contains the 'report-sample' keyword.

status-code

The HTTP status code of the resource on which the global object was instantiated.

violated-directive

The directive whose enforcement caused the violation. The violated-directive is a historic name for the effective-directive field and contains the same value.

Examples

CSP violation report with Content-Security-Policy

Let's consider a page located at http://example.com/signup.html. It uses the following policy, disallowing everything except stylesheets loaded from cdn.example.com.

http
Content-Security-Policy: default-src 'none'; style-src cdn.example.com; report-uri /_/csp-reports

The HTML of signup.html looks like this:

html
<!doctype html>
<html lang="en-US">
  <head>
    <meta charset="UTF-8" />
    <title>Sign Up</title>
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="css/style.css" />
  </head>
  <body>
    Here be content.
  </body>
</html>

Can you spot the mistake? Stylesheets are allowed to be loaded only from cdn.example.com, yet the website tries to load one from its own origin (http://example.com). A browser capable of enforcing CSP would send the following violation report as a POST request to http://example.com/_/csp-reports when the document is visited:

json
{
  "csp-report": {
    "blocked-uri": "http://example.com/css/style.css",
    "disposition": "report",
    "document-uri": "http://example.com/signup.html",
    "effective-directive": "style-src-elem",
    "original-policy": "default-src 'none'; style-src cdn.example.com; report-uri /_/csp-reports",
    "referrer": "",
    "status-code": 200,
    "violated-directive": "style-src-elem"
  }
}

As you can see, the report includes the full path to the violating resource in blocked-uri. This is not always the case. For example, if signup.html attempted to load CSS from http://anothercdn.example.com/stylesheet.css, the browser would not include the full path, only the origin, (http://anothercdn.example.com) in order to prevent leaking sensitive information about cross-origin resources. The CSP specification gives an explanation of this behavior.

CSP violation report with Content-Security-Policy-Report-Only

The report-uri directive can also be used with the Content-Security-Policy-Report-Only response header. This header allows the browser to report but not block on violations when testing.

The HTTP header would be much the same.

http
Content-Security-Policy-Report-Only: default-src 'none'; style-src cdn.example.com; report-to /_/csp-reports

The report would be the same except for the disposition "report" and of course the "original-policy":

json
{
  "csp-report": {
    "blocked-uri": "http://example.com/css/style.css",
    "disposition": "report",
    "document-uri": "http://example.com/signup.html",
    "effective-directive": "style-src-elem",
    "original-policy": "default-src 'none'; style-src cdn.example.com; report-uri /_/csp-reports",
    "referrer": "",
    "status-code": 200,
    "violated-directive": "style-src-elem"
  }
}

CSP violation logging

Given a server that sends responses with the following Content-Security-Policy header:

http
Content-Security-Policy: default-src https:; report-uri /csp-violation-report-endpoint/

/csp-violation-report-endpoint/ could for example run a PHP script like the following that logs the JSON detailing the violation and, if the violation is the first one added to the log file, sends an email to an administrator:

php
<?php

// Start configure
$log_file = dirname(__FILE__) . '/csp-violations.log';
$log_file_size_limit = 1000000; // bytes - once exceeded no further entries are added
$email_address = 'admin@example.com';
$email_subject = 'Content-Security-Policy violation';
// End configuration

$current_domain = preg_replace('/www\./i', '', $_SERVER['SERVER_NAME']);
$email_subject = $email_subject . ' on ' . $current_domain;

http_response_code(204); // HTTP 204 No Content

$json_data = file_get_contents('php://input');

// We pretty print the JSON before adding it to the log file
if ($json_data = json_decode($json_data)) {
  $json_data = json_encode($json_data, JSON_PRETTY_PRINT | JSON_UNESCAPED_SLASHES);

  if (!file_exists($log_file)) {
    // Send an email
    $message = "The following Content-Security-Policy violation occurred on " .
      $current_domain . ":\n\n" .
      $json_data .
      "\n\nFurther CPS violations will be logged to the following log file, but no further email notifications will be sent until this log file is deleted:\n\n" .
      $log_file;
    mail($email_address, $email_subject, $message,
         'Content-Type: text/plain;charset=utf-8');
  } else if (filesize($log_file) > $log_file_size_limit) {
    exit(0);
  }

  file_put_contents($log_file, $json_data, FILE_APPEND | LOCK_EX);
}

Specifications

Specification
Content Security Policy Level 3
# directive-report-uri

Browser compatibility

BCD tables only load in the browser

See also