Table of Contents

• Policies

  • Enabling

  • Features

    • Error Behavior
    • Integrity Checks

Policies#

Node.js contains experimental support for creating policies on loading code.

Policies are a security feature intended to allow guarantees about what code Node.js is able to load. The use of policies assumes safe practices for the policy files such as ensuring that policy files cannot be overwritten by the Node.js application by using file permissions.

A best practice would be to ensure that the policy manifest is read only for the running Node.js application, and that the file cannot be changed by the running Node.js application in any way. A typical setup would be to create the policy file as a different user id than the one running Node.js and granting read permissions to the user id running Node.js.

Enabling#

The --experimental-policy flag can be used to enable features for policies when loading modules.

Once this has been set, all modules must conform to a policy manifest file passed to the flag:

node --experimental-policy=policy.json app.js

The policy manifest will be used to enforce constraints on code loaded by Node.js.

In order to mitigate tampering with policy files on disk, an integrity for the policy file itself may be provided via --policy-integrity. This allows running node and asserting the policy file contents even if the file is changed on disk.

node --experimental-policy=policy.json --policy-integrity="sha384-SggXRQHwCG8g+DktYYzxkXRIkTiEYWBHqev0xnpCxYlqMBufKZHAHQM3/boDaI/0" app.js

Features#

Error Behavior#

When a policy check fails, Node.js by default will throw an error. It is possible to change the error behavior to one of a few possibilities by defining an "onerror" field in a policy manifest. The following values are available to change the behavior:

• "exit" - will exit the process immediately. No cleanup code will be allowed to run.
• "log" - will log the error at the site of the failure.
• "throw" (default) - will throw a JS error at the site of the failure.

{
  "onerror": "log",
  "resources": {
    "./app/checked.js": {
      "integrity": "sha384-SggXRQHwCG8g+DktYYzxkXRIkTiEYWBHqev0xnpCxYlqMBufKZHAHQM3/boDaI/0"
    }
  }
}

Integrity Checks#

Policy files must use integrity checks with Subresource Integrity strings compatible with the browser integrity attribute associated with absolute URLs.

When using require() all resources involved in loading are checked for integrity if a policy manifest has been specified. If a resource does not match the integrity listed in the manifest, an error will be thrown.

An example policy file that would allow loading a file checked.js:

{
  "resources": {
    "./app/checked.js": {
      "integrity": "sha384-SggXRQHwCG8g+DktYYzxkXRIkTiEYWBHqev0xnpCxYlqMBufKZHAHQM3/boDaI/0"
    }
  }
}

Each resource listed in the policy manifest can be of one the following formats to determine its location:

1. A relative url string to a resource from the manifest such as ./resource.js, ../resource.js, or /resource.js.
2. A complete url string to a resource such as file:///resource.js.

When loading resources the entire URL must match including search parameters and hash fragment. ./a.js?b will not be used when attempting to load ./a.js and vice versa.

In order to generate integrity strings, a script such as printf "sha384-$(cat checked.js | openssl dgst -sha384 -binary | base64)" can be used.