Limited availability
Note: This feature is available in Web Workers.
The Trusted Types API gives web developers a way to ensure that input has been passed through a user-specified transformation function before being passed to an API that might execute that input. This can help to protect against client-side cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks. Most commonly the transformation function sanitizes the input.
Concepts and usageClient-side, or DOM-based, XSS attacks happen when data crafted by an attacker is passed to a browser API that executes that data as code. These APIs are known as injection sinks.
The Trusted Types API distinguishes three sorts of injection sinks:
Element.innerHTML
or document.write()
. These APIs could execute JavaScript if it is embedded in the HTML, for example in <script>
tags or event handler attributes.eval()
or HTMLScriptElement.text
.HTMLScriptElement.src
.One of the main defenses against DOM-based XSS attacks is to ensure that input is made safe before being passed to an injection sink.
In the Trusted Types API, a developer defines a policy object, which contains methods that transform input bound for an injection sink so as to make it safe. The policy can define different methods for the different types of sink:
The Trusted Types API will then ensure that input is passed through the appropriate transformation function before being passed into the sink.
That is, the API enables you to define your policy in one place and then be assured that any data passed to an injection sink has been passed through the policy.
Note:
The Trusted Types API does not itself supply a policy or any transformation functions: the developer defines their own policy, which contains the transformations that they wish to apply.
The API has two main parts:
In the Trusted Types API:
trustedTypes
global property, available in both Window
and Worker
contexts, is used to create TrustedTypePolicy
objects.TrustedTypePolicy
object is used to create trusted type objects: it will do this by passing the data through a transformation function.TrustedHTML
is for passing to a sink that will render the data as HTML.TrustedScript
is for passing to a sink that will execute the data as JavaScript.TrustedScriptURL
is for passing to a sink that will parse the data as a URL to a script.With this API, instead of passing a string to an injection sink like innerHTML
, you use a TrustedTypePolicy
to create a TrustedHTML
object from the string, then pass that into the sink, and can be sure that the string has been passed through a transformation function.
For example, this code creates a TrustedTypePolicy
that can create TrustedHTML
objects by sanitizing the input strings with the DOMPurify library:
const policy = trustedTypes.createPolicy("my-policy", {
createHTML: (input) => DOMPurify.sanitize(input),
});
Next, you can use this policy
object to create a TrustedHTML
object, and pass that object into the injection sink:
const userInput = "<p>I might be XSS</p>";
const element = document.querySelector("#container");
const trustedHTML = policy.createHTML(userInput);
element.innerHTML = trustedHTML;
Using a CSP to enforce trusted types
The API described above enables you to sanitize data, but it doesn't ensure that your code never passes input directly to an injection sink: that is, it doesn't stop you passing a string into innerHTML
.
In order to enforce that a trusted type must always be passed, you include the require-trusted-types-for
directive in your CSP. With this directive set, passing strings into injection sinks will result in a TypeError
exception:
const userInput = "<p>I might be XSS</p>";
const element = document.querySelector("#container");
element.innerHTML = userInput; // Throws a TypeError
Additionally, the trusted-types
CSP directive can be used to control which policies your code is allowed to create. When you create a policy using trustedTypes.createPolicy()
, you pass a name for the policy. The trusted-types
CSP directive lists acceptable policy names, so createPolicy()
will throw an exception if it is passed a name which was not listed in trusted-types
. This prevents some code in your web application from creating a policy that you were not expecting.
In the Trusted Types API, you can define a default policy. This helps you find any places in your code where you're still passing strings into injection sinks, so you can rewrite the code to create and pass trusted types instead.
If you create a policy named "default"
, and your CSP enforces the use of trusted types, then any string argument passed into injection sinks will be automatically passed to this policy. For example, suppose we create a policy like this:
trustedTypes.createPolicy("default", {
createHTML: (value) => {
console.log("Please refactor this code");
return sanitize(value);
},
});
With this policy, if your code assigns a string to innerHTML
, the browser will call the policy's createHTML()
method and assign its result to the sink:
const userInput = "<p>I might be XSS</p>";
const element = document.querySelector("#container");
element.innerHTML = userInput;
// Logs "Please refactor this code"
// Assigns the result of sanitize(userInput)
If the default policy returned null
or undefined
, then the browser will throw a TypeError
when assigning the result to the sink:
trustedTypes.createPolicy("default", {
createHTML: (value) => {
console.log("Please refactor this code");
return null;
},
});
const userInput = "<p>I might be XSS</p>";
const element = document.querySelector("#container");
element.innerHTML = userInput;
// Logs "Please refactor this code"
// Throws a TypeError
Note: It's recommended that you use the default policy only while you are transitioning from legacy code that passes input directly to injection sinks, to code that uses trusted types explicitly.
Cross-browser support for trusted typesThe Trusted Types API is not yet available in all modern browsers, but it is usable everywhere today thanks to compatibility aids created by the W3C.
As well as these two polyfills, the W3C provides what it calls a tinyfill, which we'll explain in more detail below.
Note that as long as you have tested your code on a supporting browser with CSP enforcement enabled, then you don't need to use the full polyfill above on other browsers â you can get the same benefits using the API only polyfill or the tinyfill.
This is because the enforcement forces you to refactor your code to ensure that all data is passed through the Trusted Types API (and therefore has been through a sanitization function) before being passed to an injection sink. If you then run the refactored code in a different browser without enforcement, it will still go through the same code paths, and give you the same protection.
Trusted Types tinyfillIn this section we'll look at how the trusted types tinyfill can protect a website, even though it doesn't add support for trusted types at all.
The trusted types tinyfill is just this:
if (typeof trustedTypes == "undefined")
trustedTypes = { createPolicy: (n, rules) => rules };
It provides an implementation of trustedTypes.createPolicy()
which just returns the policyOptions
object it was passed. The policyOptions
object defines sanitization functions for data, and these functions are expected to return strings.
With this tinyfill in place, suppose we create a policy:
const policy = trustedTypes.createPolicy("my-policy", {
createHTML: (input) => DOMPurify.sanitize(input),
});
In browsers that support trusted types, this will return a TrustedTypePolicy
which will create a TrustedHTML
object when we call policy.createHTML()
. The TrustedHTML
object can then be passed to an injection sink, and we can enforce that the sink received a trusted type, rather than a string.
In browsers that don't support trusted types, this code will return an object with a createHTML()
function that sanitizes its input and returns it as a string. The sanitized string can then be passed to an injection sink.
const userInput = "I might be XSS";
const element = document.querySelector("#container");
const trustedHTML = policy.createHTML(userInput);
// In supporting browsers, trustedHTML is a TrustedHTML object.
// In non-supporting browsers, trustedHTML is a string.
element.innerHTML = trustedHTML;
// In supporting browsers, this will throw if trustedHTML
// is not a TrustedHTML object.
Either way, the injection sink gets sanitized data, and because we could enforce the use of the policy in the supporting browser, we know that this code path goes through the sanitization function in the non-supporting browser, too.
InterfacesTrustedHTML
Represents a string to insert into an injection sink that will render it as HTML.
TrustedScript
Represents a string to insert into an injection sink that could lead to the script being executed.
TrustedScriptURL
Represents a string to insert into an injection sink that will parse it as a URL of an external script resource.
TrustedTypePolicy
Defines the functions used to create the above Trusted Type objects.
TrustedTypePolicyFactory
Creates policies and verifies that Trusted Type object instances were created via one of the policies.
In the below example we create a policy that will create TrustedHTML
objects using TrustedTypePolicyFactory.createPolicy()
. We can then use TrustedTypePolicy.createHTML()
to create a sanitized HTML string to be inserted into the document.
The sanitized value can then be used with Element.innerHTML
to ensure that no new HTML elements can be injected.
const escapeHTMLPolicy = trustedTypes.createPolicy("myEscapePolicy", {
createHTML: (string) =>
string
.replace(/&/g, "&")
.replace(/</g, "<")
.replace(/"/g, """)
.replace(/'/g, "'"),
});
let el = document.getElementById("myDiv");
const escaped = escapeHTMLPolicy.createHTML("<img src=x onerror=alert(1)>");
console.log(escaped instanceof TrustedHTML); // true
el.innerHTML = escaped;
Read more about this example, and discover other ways to sanitize input in the article Prevent DOM-based cross-site scripting vulnerabilities with Trusted Types.
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