django-security 0.11.1

A collection of tools to help secure a Django project.

Django-Security

This package offers a number of models, views, middlewares and forms to facilitate security hardening of Django applications.

Full documentation

Automatically generated documentation of django-security is available on Read The Docs:

• Django-security documentation

Requirements

• Python >= 2.7
• Django >= 1.8

For Django < 1.8 use django-security==0.9.4.

Note: For versions prior to 0.10.0, datetime objects were being added to the session and required Django's PickleSerializer for (de)serializing. This has now been changed so that the strings of these datetimes are being stored instead. If you are still using PickleSerializer for this reason, we suggest switching to Django's default JSONSerializer (default since Django 1.6) for better security.

Installation

Install from Python packages repository:

pip install django-security

If you prefer the latest development version, install from django-security repository on GitHub:

git clone https://github.com/sdelements/django-security.git
cd django-security
sudo python setup.py install

Adding to Django application's settings.py file:

INSTALLED_APPS = (
    ...
    'security',
    ...
    )

Pre-Django 1.10, middleware modules can be added to MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES list in settings file:

MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES = (
...
'security.middleware.DoNotTrackMiddleware',
'security.middleware.ContentNoSniff',
'security.middleware.XssProtectMiddleware',
'security.middleware.XFrameOptionsMiddleware',
)

After Django 1.10, middleware modules can be added to MIDDLEWARE list in settings file:

MIDDLEWARE = (
...
'security.middleware.DoNotTrackMiddleware',
'security.middleware.ContentNoSniff',
'security.middleware.XssProtectMiddleware',
'security.middleware.XFrameOptionsMiddleware',
)

Unlike the modules listed above, some other modules require configuration settings, fully described in django-security documentation. Brief description is provided below.

Middleware

Provided middleware modules will modify web application's output and input and in most cases requires no or minimum configuration.

Middleware	Description	Configuration
ClearSiteDataMiddleware	Send Clear-Site-Data header in HTTP response for any page that has been whitelisted. Recommended,.	Required.
ContentNoSniff	Disable possibly insecure autodetection of MIME types in browsers. Recommended.	None.
ContentSecurityPolicyMiddleware	Send Content Security Policy (CSP) header in HTTP response. Recommended, requires careful tuning.	Required.
DoNotTrackMiddleware	Read user browser's DoNotTrack preference and pass it to application. Recommended, requires implementation in views and templates.	None.
LoginRequiredMiddleware	Requires a user to be authenticated to view any page on the site that hasn't been white listed.	Required.
MandatoryPasswordChangeMiddleware	Redirects any request from an authenticated user to the password change form if that user's password has expired.	Required.
NoConfidentialCachingMiddleware	Adds No-Cache and No-Store headers to confidential pages.	Required.
P3PPolicyMiddleware	Adds the HTTP header attribute specifying compact P3P policy.	Required.
SessionExpiryPolicyMiddleware	Expire sessions on browser close, and on expiry times stored in the cookie itself.	Required.
StrictTransportSecurityMiddleware	Enforce SSL/TLS connection and disable plaintext fall-back. Recommended for SSL/TLS sites.	Optional.
XFrameOptionsMiddleware	Disable framing of the website, mitigating Clickjacking attacks. Recommended.	Optional.
XssProtectMiddleware	Enforce browser's Cross Site Scripting protection. Recommended.	None.

Views

csp_report

View that allows reception of Content Security Policy violation reports sent by browsers in response to CSP header set by ``ContentSecurityPolicyMiddleware`. This should be used only if long term, continuous CSP report analysis is required. For one time CSP setup CspBuilder is much simpler.

This view can be configured to either log received reports or store them in database. See documentation for details.

require_ajax

A view decorator which ensures that the request being proccessed by view is an AJAX request. Example usage:

@require_ajax
def myview(request):
    ...

Models

CspReport

Content Security Policy violation report object. Only makes sense if ContentSecurityPolicyMiddleware and csp_report view are used. With this model, the reports can be then analysed in Django admin site.

PasswordExpiry

Associate a password expiry date with a user.

Logging

All django-security modules send important log messages to security facility. The application should configure a handler to receive them:

LOGGING = {
    ...
    'loggers': {
        'security': {
            'handlers': ['console',],
            'level': 'INFO',
            'propagate': False,
            'formatter': 'verbose',
        },
    ...