About Security Headers Validator

Security Headers Validator is a Python tool designed to detect missing security headers and use of deprecated headers, based on the OWASP Secure Headers Project. It provides a simple way to identify potential security risks associated with the headers sent by web servers.

Security Headers Validator detects:

• Missing security headers
• Use of deprecated security headers
• Use of recommended security headers

Security Headers Validator is written to be modular and hackable, you can easily add your custom headers and it's best practices.

Security Headers Validator in Action

Installation

Security Headers Validator supports Python 3. Just clone the repository and and all is set. Install the requests library if needed.

$ git clone https://github.com/balpars/Security-Headers-Validator.git
$ cd Security-Headers-Validator
$ pip3 install -r requirements.txt

Dependencies

Security Headers Validator depends on the requests Python module. This dependency can be installed using pip.

$ pip3 install -r requirements.txt

Usage

Short Form	Long Form	Description
-t	--target	target url eg. https://example_site.com
-h	--help	show the help message and exit

• Specify target with -t variable. Provide the full url as below.

python scanner.py -t https://example_site.com

How do I add a new header?

By following steps below you can add and integrate your headers to Security Headers Validator.

1 - Navigate to headers folder and create the <header_name>.py file eg. user_agent.py

2 - Copy the contents of template_header.py into your header file.

3 - Modify your header file as needed.

4 - Find the list variable "header_files" in the header_compiler.py

5 - Append the file name to header_files eg.
header_files = ["x_content_type_options.py", "user_agent.py"]

Optinal: Test your headers. Append the file name to header_files in test_headers.py. Run the test_headers.py to ensure that your header file works correctly. pytest test_headers.py

Warnings

Header file names should not contain dashes. Instead use underscore. This is to prevent import errors.

Correct: user_agent.py Incorrect: user-agent.py

Unit-test

• Requires pytest

Navigate to projects directory and run the command below to test if your headers work.

pytest tests/test_headers.py

Planned Future Improvements

• List argument to scan a url list.
• Detect information disclosures in headers
• Detect weak CSP configurations.

Final remarks

• This is the first time we publicly release a tool. Contributions are much appreciated!

• This project will be regularly updated and continued to be improved.

• If you'd like to get in touch with us for any suggestions regarding the project, feel free to open an issue or send a pull request.

Contributors

Yasin Çelik
Bedirhan Alp Arslan