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  1. $sceProvider
  2. service in module ng

$sce is a service that provides Strict Contextual Escaping services to AngularJS.

Strict Contextual Escaping

Strict Contextual Escaping (SCE) is a mode in which AngularJS requires bindings in certain contexts to result in a value that is marked as safe to use for that context. One example of such a context is binding arbitrary html controlled by the user via ng-bind-html. We refer to these contexts as privileged or SCE contexts.

As of version 1.2, Angular ships with SCE enabled by default.

Note: When enabled (the default), IE<11 in quirks mode is not supported. In this mode, IE<11 allow one to execute arbitrary javascript by the use of the expression() syntax. Refer to learn more about them. You can ensure your document is in standards mode and not quirks mode by adding <!doctype html> to the top of your HTML document.

SCE assists in writing code in way that (a) is secure by default and (b) makes auditing for security vulnerabilities such as XSS, clickjacking, etc. a lot easier.

Here's an example of a binding in a privileged context:

<input ng-model="userHtml">
<div ng-bind-html="userHtml"></div>

Notice that ng-bind-html is bound to userHtml controlled by the user. With SCE disabled, this application allows the user to render arbitrary HTML into the DIV. In a more realistic example, one may be rendering user comments, blog articles, etc. via bindings. (HTML is just one example of a context where rendering user controlled input creates security vulnerabilities.)

For the case of HTML, you might use a library, either on the client side, or on the server side, to sanitize unsafe HTML before binding to the value and rendering it in the document.

How would you ensure that every place that used these types of bindings was bound to a value that was sanitized by your library (or returned as safe for rendering by your server?) How can you ensure that you didn't accidentally delete the line that sanitized the value, or renamed some properties/fields and forgot to update the binding to the sanitized value?

To be secure by default, you want to ensure that any such bindings are disallowed unless you can determine that something explicitly says it's safe to use a value for binding in that context. You can then audit your code (a simple grep would do) to ensure that this is only done for those values that you can easily tell are safe - because they were received from your server, sanitized by your library, etc. You can organize your codebase to help with this - perhaps allowing only the files in a specific directory to do this. Ensuring that the internal API exposed by that code doesn't markup arbitrary values as safe then becomes a more manageable task.

In the case of AngularJS' SCE service, one uses $sce.trustAs (and shorthand methods such as $sce.trustAsHtml, etc.) to obtain values that will be accepted by SCE / privileged contexts.

How does it work?

In privileged contexts, directives and code will bind to the result of $sce.getTrusted(context, value) rather than to the value directly. Directives use $sce.parseAs rather than $parse to watch attribute bindings, which performs the $sce.getTrusted behind the scenes on non-constant literals.

As an example, ngBindHtml uses $sce.parseAsHtml(binding expression). Here's the actual code (slightly simplified):

var ngBindHtmlDirective = ['$sce', function($sce) {
  return function(scope, element, attr) {
    scope.$watch($sce.parseAsHtml(attr.ngBindHtml), function(value) {
      element.html(value || '');
    });
  };
}];

Impact on loading templates

This applies both to the ng-include directive as well as templateUrl's specified by directives.

By default, Angular only loads templates from the same domain and protocol as the application document. This is done by calling $sce.getTrustedResourceUrl on the template URL. To load templates from other domains and/or protocols, you may either either whitelist them or wrap it into a trusted value.

Please note: The browser's Same Origin Policy and Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) policy apply in addition to this and may further restrict whether the template is successfully loaded. This means that without the right CORS policy, loading templates from a different domain won't work on all browsers. Also, loading templates from file:// URL does not work on some browsers.

This feels like too much overhead

It's important to remember that SCE only applies to interpolation expressions.

If your expressions are constant literals, they're automatically trusted and you don't need to call $sce.trustAs on them (remember to include the ngSanitize module) (e.g. <div ng-bind-html="'<b>implicitly trusted</b>'"></div>) just works.

Additionally, a[href] and img[src] automatically sanitize their URLs and do not pass them through $sce.getTrusted. SCE doesn't play a role here.

The included $sceDelegate comes with sane defaults to allow you to load templates in ng-include from your application's domain without having to even know about SCE. It blocks loading templates from other domains or loading templates over http from an https served document. You can change these by setting your own custom whitelists and blacklists for matching such URLs.

This significantly reduces the overhead. It is far easier to pay the small overhead and have an application that's secure and can be audited to verify that with much more ease than bolting security onto an application later.

What trusted context types are supported?

Context Notes
$sce.HTML For HTML that's safe to source into the application. The ngBindHtml directive uses this context for bindings. If an unsafe value is encountered and the $sanitize module is present this will sanitize the value instead of throwing an error.
$sce.CSS For CSS that's safe to source into the application. Currently unused. Feel free to use it in your own directives.
$sce.URL For URLs that are safe to follow as links. Currently unused (<a href= and <img src= sanitize their urls and don't constitute an SCE context.
$sce.RESOURCE_URL For URLs that are not only safe to follow as links, but whose contents are also safe to include in your application. Examples include ng-include, src / ngSrc bindings for tags other than IMG (e.g. IFRAME, OBJECT, etc.)

Note that $sce.RESOURCE_URL makes a stronger statement about the URL than $sce.URL does and therefore contexts requiring values trusted for $sce.RESOURCE_URL can be used anywhere that values trusted for $sce.URL are required.
$sce.JS For JavaScript that is safe to execute in your application's context. Currently unused. Feel free to use it in your own directives.

Format of items in resourceUrlWhitelist/Blacklist

Each element in these arrays must be one of the following:

  • 'self'
    • The special string, 'self', can be used to match against all URLs of the same domain as the application document using the same protocol.
  • String (except the special value 'self')
    • The string is matched against the full normalized / absolute URL of the resource being tested (substring matches are not good enough.)
    • There are exactly two wildcard sequences - * and **. All other characters match themselves.
    • *: matches zero or more occurrences of any character other than one of the following 6 characters: ':', '/', '.', '?', '&' and ';'. It's a useful wildcard for use in a whitelist.
    • **: matches zero or more occurrences of any character. As such, it's not appropriate for use in a scheme, domain, etc. as it would match too much. (e.g. http://**.example.com/ would match http://evil.com/?ignore=.example.com/ and that might not have been the intention.) Its usage at the very end of the path is ok. (e.g. http://foo.example.com/templates/**).
  • RegExp (see caveat below)
    • Caveat: While regular expressions are powerful and offer great flexibility, their syntax (and all the inevitable escaping) makes them harder to maintain. It's easy to accidentally introduce a bug when one updates a complex expression (imho, all regexes should have good test coverage). For instance, the use of . in the regex is correct only in a small number of cases. A . character in the regex used when matching the scheme or a subdomain could be matched against a : or literal . that was likely not intended. It is highly recommended to use the string patterns and only fall back to regular expressions as a last resort.
    • The regular expression must be an instance of RegExp (i.e. not a string.) It is matched against the entire normalized / absolute URL of the resource being tested (even when the RegExp did not have the ^ and $ codes.) In addition, any flags present on the RegExp (such as multiline, global, ignoreCase) are ignored.
    • If you are generating your JavaScript from some other templating engine (not recommended, e.g. in issue #4006), remember to escape your regular expression (and be aware that you might need more than one level of escaping depending on your templating engine and the way you interpolated the value.) Do make use of your platform's escaping mechanism as it might be good enough before coding your own. E.g. Ruby has Regexp.escape(str) and Python has re.escape. Javascript lacks a similar built in function for escaping. Take a look at Google Closure library's goog.string.regExpEscape(s).

Refer $sceDelegateProvider for an example.

Show me an example using SCE.

Can I disable SCE completely?

Yes, you can. However, this is strongly discouraged. SCE gives you a lot of security benefits for little coding overhead. It will be much harder to take an SCE disabled application and either secure it on your own or enable SCE at a later stage. It might make sense to disable SCE for cases where you have a lot of existing code that was written before SCE was introduced and you're migrating them a module at a time.

That said, here's how you can completely disable SCE:

angular.module('myAppWithSceDisabledmyApp', []).config(function($sceProvider) {
  // Completely disable SCE.  For demonstration purposes only!
  // Do not use in new projects.
  $sceProvider.enabled(false);
});

Usage

$sce();

Methods

  • isEnabled();

    Returns a boolean indicating if SCE is enabled.

    Returns

    Boolean

    true if SCE is enabled, false otherwise. If you want to set the value, you have to do it at module config time on $sceProvider.

  • parseAs(type, expression);

    Converts Angular expression into a function. This is like $parse and is identical when the expression is a literal constant. Otherwise, it wraps the expression in a call to $sce.getTrusted(type, result)

    Parameters

    Param Type Details
    type string

    The kind of SCE context in which this result will be used.
    expression string

    String expression to compile.

    Returns

    function(context, locals)

    a function which represents the compiled expression:

    • context – {object} – an object against which any expressions embedded in the strings are evaluated against (typically a scope object).
    • locals – {object=} – local variables context object, useful for overriding values in context.

  • trustAs(type, value);

    Delegates to $sceDelegate.trustAs. As such, returns an object that is trusted by angular for use in specified strict contextual escaping contexts (such as ng-bind-html, ng-include, any src attribute interpolation, any dom event binding attribute interpolation such as for onclick, etc.) that uses the provided value. See * $sce for enabling strict contextual escaping.

    Parameters

    Param Type Details
    type string

    The kind of context in which this value is safe for use. e.g. url, resource_url, html, js and css.
    value *

    The value that that should be considered trusted/safe.

    Returns

    *

    A value that can be used to stand in for the provided value in places where Angular expects a $sce.trustAs() return value.

  • trustAsHtml(value);

    Shorthand method. $sce.trustAsHtml(value) → $sceDelegate.trustAs($sce.HTML, value)

    Parameters

    Param Type Details
    value *

    The value to trustAs.

    Returns

    *

    An object that can be passed to $sce.getTrustedHtml(value) to obtain the original value. (privileged directives only accept expressions that are either literal constants or are the return value of $sce.trustAs.)

  • trustAsUrl(value);

    Shorthand method. $sce.trustAsUrl(value) → $sceDelegate.trustAs($sce.URL, value)

    Parameters

    Param Type Details
    value *

    The value to trustAs.

    Returns

    *

    An object that can be passed to $sce.getTrustedUrl(value) to obtain the original value. (privileged directives only accept expressions that are either literal constants or are the return value of $sce.trustAs.)

  • trustAsResourceUrl(value);

    Shorthand method. $sce.trustAsResourceUrl(value) → $sceDelegate.trustAs($sce.RESOURCE_URL, value)

    Parameters

    Param Type Details
    value *

    The value to trustAs.

    Returns

    *

    An object that can be passed to $sce.getTrustedResourceUrl(value) to obtain the original value. (privileged directives only accept expressions that are either literal constants or are the return value of $sce.trustAs.)

  • trustAsJs(value);

    Shorthand method. $sce.trustAsJs(value) → $sceDelegate.trustAs($sce.JS, value)

    Parameters

    Param Type Details
    value *

    The value to trustAs.

    Returns

    *

    An object that can be passed to $sce.getTrustedJs(value) to obtain the original value. (privileged directives only accept expressions that are either literal constants or are the return value of $sce.trustAs.)

  • getTrusted(type, maybeTrusted);

    Delegates to $sceDelegate.getTrusted. As such, takes the result of a $sce.trustAs() call and returns the originally supplied value if the queried context type is a supertype of the created type. If this condition isn't satisfied, throws an exception.

    Parameters

    Param Type Details
    type string

    The kind of context in which this value is to be used.
    maybeTrusted *

    The result of a prior $sce.trustAs call.

    Returns

    *

    The value the was originally provided to $sce.trustAs if valid in this context. Otherwise, throws an exception.

  • getTrustedHtml(value);

    Shorthand method. $sce.getTrustedHtml(value) → $sceDelegate.getTrusted($sce.HTML, value)

    Parameters

    Param Type Details
    value *

    The value to pass to $sce.getTrusted.

    Returns

    *

    The return value of $sce.getTrusted($sce.HTML, value)

  • getTrustedCss(value);

    Shorthand method. $sce.getTrustedCss(value) → $sceDelegate.getTrusted($sce.CSS, value)

    Parameters

    Param Type Details
    value *

    The value to pass to $sce.getTrusted.

    Returns

    *

    The return value of $sce.getTrusted($sce.CSS, value)

  • getTrustedUrl(value);

    Shorthand method. $sce.getTrustedUrl(value) → $sceDelegate.getTrusted($sce.URL, value)

    Parameters

    Param Type Details
    value *

    The value to pass to $sce.getTrusted.

    Returns

    *

    The return value of $sce.getTrusted($sce.URL, value)

  • getTrustedResourceUrl(value);

    Shorthand method. $sce.getTrustedResourceUrl(value) → $sceDelegate.getTrusted($sce.RESOURCE_URL, value)

    Parameters

    Param Type Details
    value *

    The value to pass to $sceDelegate.getTrusted.

    Returns

    *

    The return value of $sce.getTrusted($sce.RESOURCE_URL, value)

  • getTrustedJs(value);

    Shorthand method. $sce.getTrustedJs(value) → $sceDelegate.getTrusted($sce.JS, value)

    Parameters

    Param Type Details
    value *

    The value to pass to $sce.getTrusted.

    Returns

    *

    The return value of $sce.getTrusted($sce.JS, value)

  • parseAsHtml(expression);

    Shorthand method. $sce.parseAsHtml(expression string) → $sce.parseAs($sce.HTML, value)

    Parameters

    Param Type Details
    expression string

    String expression to compile.

    Returns

    function(context, locals)

    a function which represents the compiled expression:

    • context – {object} – an object against which any expressions embedded in the strings are evaluated against (typically a scope object).
    • locals – {object=} – local variables context object, useful for overriding values in context.

  • parseAsCss(expression);

    Shorthand method. $sce.parseAsCss(value) → $sce.parseAs($sce.CSS, value)

    Parameters

    Param Type Details
    expression string

    String expression to compile.

    Returns

    function(context, locals)

    a function which represents the compiled expression:

    • context – {object} – an object against which any expressions embedded in the strings are evaluated against (typically a scope object).
    • locals – {object=} – local variables context object, useful for overriding values in context.

  • parseAsUrl(expression);

    Shorthand method. $sce.parseAsUrl(value) → $sce.parseAs($sce.URL, value)

    Parameters

    Param Type Details
    expression string

    String expression to compile.

    Returns

    function(context, locals)

    a function which represents the compiled expression:

    • context – {object} – an object against which any expressions embedded in the strings are evaluated against (typically a scope object).
    • locals – {object=} – local variables context object, useful for overriding values in context.

  • parseAsResourceUrl(expression);

    Shorthand method. $sce.parseAsResourceUrl(value) → $sce.parseAs($sce.RESOURCE_URL, value)

    Parameters

    Param Type Details
    expression string

    String expression to compile.

    Returns

    function(context, locals)

    a function which represents the compiled expression:

    • context – {object} – an object against which any expressions embedded in the strings are evaluated against (typically a scope object).
    • locals – {object=} – local variables context object, useful for overriding values in context.

  • parseAsJs(expression);

    Shorthand method. $sce.parseAsJs(value) → $sce.parseAs($sce.JS, value)

    Parameters

    Param Type Details
    expression string

    String expression to compile.

    Returns

    function(context, locals)

    a function which represents the compiled expression:

    • context – {object} – an object against which any expressions embedded in the strings are evaluated against (typically a scope object).
    • locals – {object=} – local variables context object, useful for overriding values in context.

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Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0.
https://code.angularjs.org/1.3.20/docs/api/ng/service/$sce