GigaOM Radar Edge Platform Leader & Outperformer 2024 | 
Strengthen Your Online Defense with Edgio's Client-Side Protection
In today’s digital landscape, where online interactions are integral to both personal and professional activities, ensuring robust client-side security has become more crucial than ever. Edgio’s Client-Side Protection provides a comprehensive solution to safeguard users’ data and maintain their privacy while interacting with web applications. By effectively detecting, monitoring, and blocking Content Security Policy (CSP) violations, Edgio helps thwart cyber threats that target vulnerabilities in web browsers, mobile apps, and other user-facing technologies. This blog delves into how Client-Side Protection can fortify client-side security, ensuring a safer and more trustworthy online experience for everyone.
Content Security Policy (CSP) violations can lead to several significant issues including:
- Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) Attacks: Without a proper CSP, malicious scripts can execute in the context of the user’s browser, leading to data theft, session hijacking, and malware distribution.
- Data Exfiltration: CSP violations can allow unauthorized scripts to exfiltrate sensitive user data, such as personal information, credit card details, and login credentials, to external servers.
- Clickjacking: CSP violations can enable attackers to manipulate the user interface, tricking users into clicking on malicious elements disguised as legitimate content.
- Code Injection: Attackers can inject malicious code into web pages, potentially compromising the application and user data.
- Mixed Content Issues: Loading insecure (HTTP) content on a secure (HTTPS) page can result from a weak content security policy, undermining the security of the entire web session.
- Defacement: Attackers can modify the appearance or content of a web page, leading to brand damage and loss of user trust.
- Unauthorized Resource Loading: CSP violations can allow the loading of unauthorized resources, such as untrusted scripts, styles, or media, compromising the integrity and security of the web application.
- Performance Degradation: Malicious or unauthorized scripts can cause significant performance issues, slowing down the website and providing poor user experience.
Understanding these issues underscores why enforcing a robust CSP is critical for maintaining the security and integrity of web applications. Edgio’s Client-Side Protection addresses these challenges by effectively detecting, monitoring, and blocking CSP violations, ensuring a safer online experience for users and developers alike.
Edgio’s Multi-layered defense strategy
Edgio adopts a comprehensive approach to security, employing multiple layers of defense within its Web Application and API Protection (WAAP) solution. This layered strategy ensures thorough protection against a wide array of threats, with Client-Side Protection serving as a critical component in this security framework. By integrating Client-Side Protection alongside access control rules, API Security, Rate Limiting, Advanced Bot Management, Custom Rules, and Managed Rules, Edgio effectively fortifies web applications and APIs against malicious activities such as XSS attacks, data exfiltration, and bot-driven assaults. Each layer operates sequentially, filtering and inspecting incoming traffic to identify and mitigate threats proactively. This holistic approach not only enhances security but also minimizes the risk of false positives and ensures that legitimate user traffic remains uninterrupted, offering robust and reliable protection for modern digital environments.
For a deeper dive into Edgio’s threat assessment methodologies, check out an insightful blog post authored by our security expert and VP of Product, Richard Yew – Edgio WAAP Rules – Created Order Out of Chaos.
How does Edgio handle CSP violations?
Edgio’s Client-Side Protection offers continuous discovery, monitoring, and inventory of scripts, ensuring comprehensive oversight of all executed code. By effectively blocking malicious JavaScript, Edgio prevents unauthorized access and potential data breaches. The Audit Mode feature enhances transparency by providing full visibility into script behavior in both production and testing environments, facilitating quicker A/B testing cycles without compromising security. Edgio’s Client-Side Protection supports multiple content security policies, allowing tailored configurations to meet specific security needs. Moreover, it is compliant with PCI DSS 4.0 requirements (6.4.3 and 11.6.1), ensuring adherence to industry standards for handling sensitive payment card information.
Dual (Audit) mode for ease of A/B testing
Edgio’s CSP solution is uniquely equipped with a dual (audit) mode for managing CSP violations. This capability allows users to safely experiment with different directives, without risk of blocking legitimate scripts, across various assets and client browsers before implementing them in production. Without this capability, there is a potential risk of adversely affecting user experience during interactions with your website.
Ease of Management
Edgio’s Client-Side Protection includes an intuitive policy editor that simplifies the configuration of directives, streamlining the process of policy administration. This user-friendly tool enables administrators to easily create, modify, and manage security policies, ensuring that CSP directives are accurately implemented and maintained with minimal effort.
Alternatively, one can configure a directive directly in the raw editor as well.
Observability
Edgio Client-Side Protection also can give you insights into the origin of your loaded resources. For instance, by setting an Audit policy’s default-src to none, you can view all assets loaded by your site along with their respective locations. This enables you to identify legitimate resources that may be violating your current production policy, allowing you to adjust the policy accordingly to permit those resources.
Edgio provides in-depth details on every CSP violation. The drill-down helps you understand the nature and source of each violation, allowing you to address potential security issues effectively and refine your policies for enhanced protection.
Rapid deployment
After applying CSP directives to a production profile, you can then assign these directives to the relevant properties which you wish to protect.
In this instance, we have implemented the policy for specific hostnames within a property. Once applied, the changes take effect within less than 60 seconds.
Summary
Edgio’s Client-Side Protection offers a comprehensive solution to safeguard user data and maintain privacy during online interactions with its intuitive policy editor, dual-mode CSP management, and detailed reports. These features streamline policy management and provide valuable insights for continuous improvement. For more details on setup and best practices, check out our Client-Side Protection documentation or reach out to one of our security experts today!
