Inline Integrity

1. Introduction

Websites are well-understood to be compositions of resources from a variety of servers, woven together in one origin’s context to satisfy a developer’s goals. These resources are generally requested through elements like script and link, instructing user agents to make explicit requests to other servers on the page’s behalf, and to include those resources as part of the page’s construction:

<script src="https://widgets-r-us.example/widget.js"></script>

Developers, however, often have reasons (performance, privacy, etc) to avoid asking users' agents to take responsibility for these additional requests. Rather than composing the page at runtime, they might choose to embed code more directly, copy/pasting snippets into inline script blocks, or relying upon layers of infrastructure to inline their dependencies through server-side includes (Fastly implements a subset of [ESI-LANG], for example). Depending on the development team, these dependencies might not even be third-party in the traditional sense, but developed as internally-shared frameworks that are jammed together through internal infrastructure:

<!-- The main document: -->
<esi:include src="https://widgets-r-us.example/widget.include" />

<!-- https://widgets-r-us.example/widget.include is inlined below -->
<script>
  /* Code goes here. */
</script>
<!-- End of https://widgets-r-us.example/widget.include's content -->

These inlined blocks are a stumbling block for developers who wish to deploy strong protections against injection attacks, as architectural decisions might make it difficult to coordinate nonce attributes or content hashes between inlined scripts and `Content-Security-Policy` headers delivered with the page. Sites might fall back to allowing 'unsafe-inline', or simply forgoing a policy in the first place.

Signatures might provide an option that satisfies developers' need without additionally complicating deployments. In short, if developers can agree with their dependencies on a (set of) signing key(s), they can encode those relatively static constraints in the page’s content security policy, and validate inlined script’s signatures against those known-good keys. This provides a proof of provenance for the code in question, allowing developers to ensure the integrity of their supply chain in a dynamic fashion:

<!-- https://widgets-r-us.example/widget.include -->
<script signature="ed25519-[base64-encoded signature]"
        integrity="ed25519-[base64-encoded public key]">
  /* Code goes here. */
</script>

<script signature="ed25519-hyFFWrQ21vPXZDV07Mn17Q3ufvYBJDs23CeYu1hGUQi4D+LN99D9I1KmXBGV5kBZtf8h4JIxBLoBzIqLdpudDg=="
        integrity="ed25519-JrQLj5P/89iXES9+vFgrIy29clF9CC/oPPsw3c5D0bs=">
  alert(1);
</script>

Content-Security-Policy: script-src 'ed25519-JrQLj5P/89iXES9+vFgrIy29clF9CC/oPPsw3c5D0bs='

2. Framework

2.1. Validation

2.2. Monkey-patching HTML

The following changes wire up both script and style elements to perform signature validation before being used on a page:

2.2.1. <script> Patches #

The following additions to script are required:

partial interface HTMLScriptElement {
  [CEReactions] attribute DOMString signature;
};

The signature attribute represents a set of signatures over the element’s child text content. The signature attribute must not be specified when the src attribute is specified.

The signature IDL attribute reflects the value of the signature content attribute.

We’ll also remove the restriction against integrity attributes coexisting with src attributes:

The integrity attribute represents the integrity metadata for requests which this element is responsible for. The value is text. The integrity attribute must not be specified when the src attribute is not specified.

We could also reconsider the restrictions on using integrity on data blocks and import maps. Both could benefit from this kind of integrity check?

2.2.2. <style> Patches #

The following additions to style are necessary:

partial interface HTMLStyleElement {
  [CEReactions] attribute DOMString integrity;
  [CEReactions] attribute DOMString signature;
};

The integrity attribute represents integrity metadata for the element. The value is text. [SRI].

The signature attribute represents a set of signatures over the element’s child text content.

The integrity IDL attribute reflects the value of the integrity content attribute.

The signature IDL attribute reflects the value of the signature content attribute.

2.2.3. Script execution

2.2.4. Style application

3. Implementation Considerations

3.1. What is being signed?

The signature is asserted over the script or style element’s child text content, which importantly includes both leading and trailing whitespace. That means that <script>alert(1);</script> will have a different signature than <script> alert(1);</script> and <script>alert(1); </script>.

3.2. How does this compare to Signature-Based Integrity?

The signature-based integrity proposal relies upon HTTP Message Signatures [RFC9421] to explain how signatures can be validated over resources requested from a remote server. As the request and response metadata plays an important role in how the resource is treated by the user agent, the intermediate signature base concept is a necessary complexity that allows a server to ensure that the signature covers all the relevant data.

Here, we have a simpler task: the entirety of the content to be validated is embedded in the document, available at parse time. We can work with the content directly, as there’s no relevant metadata.

This means that a resource delivered via HTTP will have a different signature than a resource delivered inline, even if the keys used are the same. This is unfortunate, but the alternative of synthesizing a signature base for inline content seems worse in practically every way.

4. Security Considerations

4.1. Integration with CSP

Broadly, the mechanism described here aims to make it easier for developers to deploy protections against unintended injection attacks even while relying upon inlined script or style blocks. It aims to do so in a way consistent with existing protections like [SRI] and [CSP], giving developers a clear path towards more safely including their dependencies.

Rather than allowing 'unsafe-inline', developers will have the option of restricting themselves to inline scripts signed by a specific key.

5. Privacy Considerations

5.1. Implications for Content Blocking

Developers inline script in many cases to improve user experience, but script is also inlined for purposes that undercut user agency. It’s more difficult, for example, for extensions and other mediating software to modify or block particular resources when they’re not fetched independently, but are instead part of the document itself.

This proposal has the potential to remove some of the security risk associated with inlined script, but might also be seen as encouraging inlining in ways that could have negative privacy implications. Two considerations mitigate this risk:

1. This proposal doesn’t create any more encouragement to inline script for the purposes of evading user’s intent to block it than the status quo already does. It allows developers to remove one risk associated with inlined content, but that seems quite unlikely to shift incentives to anything near the extent that content-blocking extensions already do.

2. Tying inline content to a specific public key to prove provenance might provide an additional hook for content blocking scripts that could allow more clean identification of a given script’s owner. As these keys are more static than the content itself, this proposal might actually simplify the process of pointing to a specific script in a document as being worthy of additional inspection.