Preface

This article has a little less technical content, and I would like to share with you the process of writing this series of articles and some thoughts after finishing it.

If you haven’t read this series of articles yet, the links are as follows:

• CORS Complete Guide (1): Why CORS Error Occurs?
• CORS Complete Guide (2): How to Solve CORS Problems?
• CORS Complete Guide (3): CORS Details
• CORS Complete Guide (4): Looking at the Specification Together
• CORS Complete Guide (5): Security Issues of Cross-Origin
• CORS Complete Guide (6): Summary, Afterword, and Leftovers

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Introduction

In the previous articles, we learned that the CORS protocol is essentially a security protocol. In addition to CORS, there are actually a series of things related to cross-origin, such as:

1. CORB (Cross-Origin Read Blocking)
2. CORP (Cross-Origin Resource Policy)
3. COEP (Cross-Origin-Embedder-Policy)
4. COOP (Cross-Origin-Opener-Policy)

Doesn’t just seeing this series of similar terms make you dizzy? Yes, me too. In the process of organizing this information, I found that the security issues related to cross-origin are more complicated than I thought, but after spending some time organizing them, I found that there is still a logical sequence to follow. Therefore, this article will explain why these things appear in a context that I think should be easier to understand.

In addition to the various COXX things mentioned above, there are other cross-origin related security issues that I want to mention in this article.

Before we continue, I would like to remind everyone that this article is about “security issues of cross-origin”, not just “security issues of CORS”. The things protected by the CORS protocol and their content have been introduced before. What this article is going to talk about is actually somewhat deviating from the main title “CORS” complete guide, because this is not very related to the CORS protocol, but rather raises the level again and talks about “cross-origin” itself.

So when you read the following things, don’t confuse them with CORS. Except for the first thing to be discussed later, the others are not very related to CORS.

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Introduction

After acquiring knowledge, how can you determine whether it is correct or not? In the field of programming, this is actually a relatively simple question. You just need to check how the specification is written (if there is one).

For example, various language features of JavaScript can be found in the ECMAScript Specification. Why [] === [] is false, why 'b' + 'a' + + 'a' + 'a' is baNaNa, all of these are explained in detail in the specification, using what rules to perform the conversion.

In addition to JS, almost all HTML or other related specifications in the Web field can be found on w3.org or whatwg.org, and the resources are quite rich.

Although the implementation of browsers may be different from what is written in the specification (such as this article), the spec is the most complete and authoritative place, so it is correct to come here to find information.

If you search for the CORS spec, you may find RFC6454 - The Web Origin Concept and W3C’s Cross-Origin Resource Sharing, but these two have been replaced by a document called Fetch.

At first, I was puzzled and thought I had read it wrong. What is the relationship between fetch and CORS? Later, I learned that the fetch here is different from the fetch in the Web API. This specification defines everything related to “fetching data”, as written in its outline:

The Fetch standard defines requests, responses, and the process that binds them: fetching.

In this article, let’s take a look at the CORS-related specifications together, proving that what I said in the previous articles is not nonsense, but based on facts. Since the specification is quite long, I will only pick some key points that I think are important. If you want to understand all the content of the specification, you still need to read it yourself.

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Introduction

In the previous article, we mentioned the common solutions to CORS errors and the solution that should be chosen in most cases: “Ask the backend to add response headers.”

However, “cross-origin requests” can actually be further divided into two types: simple requests and non-simple requests. Simple requests can be solved using the solution in the previous article, but non-simple requests are more complicated.

In addition, cross-origin requests do not send cookies by default, and an additional setting is required when using xhr or fetch, and the backend also needs to add an additional header.

There are actually many headers related to CORS, some of which you may not have heard of. Originally, I wanted to list these things one by one and explain them, but after careful consideration, I felt that this would be a bit boring, and everyone would probably forget after reading it.

So what would be a better way? Everyone likes to hear stories, so in this article, let’s start from the perspective of a story and tell you a story about love and CORS.

The protagonist’s name is well known, yes, it’s the unoriginal Xiaoming.

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Introduction

In the previous article CORS Complete Guide (Part 1): Why CORS Error Occurs?, we understood why the browser has a same-origin policy and that the blocked cross-origin request is actually the response, not the request. After clarifying some misconceptions and having a basic understanding of CORS, we can now talk about how to solve CORS issues.

First of all, I want to let you know that the methods mentioned in this article are not complete solutions. In fact, cross-origin requests are divided into two types: simple requests and non-simple requests. The fact that “the blocked cross-origin request is actually the response, not the request” basically only applies to simple requests, and this article will only focus on “simple requests”. As for how to distinguish between simple and non-simple requests, and how to handle non-simple requests, these will be discussed in the next article.

There are actually many ways to solve basic CORS errors. Let’s first introduce a few “palliative” methods:

1. Turn off the browser’s security settings.
2. Set the fetch mode to no-cors.
3. Do not use AJAX to fetch data.

After discussing these three methods, we will talk about the last and most correct method: “Add CORS header to the backend”.

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Preface

Three years ago, I wrote an article: Easy Understanding of AJAX and Cross-Origin Requests, which mentioned API integration, AJAX, same-origin policy, JSONP, and CORS. At that time, I put everything I wanted to say into it, but looking back now, it seems that many important parts were not mentioned.

Three years later, I am challenging this topic again and trying to express it more completely.

The reason why I want to write this series is that CORS is a frequently asked topic in programming-related discussion forums, and both front-end and back-end developers may ask related questions.

So I thought: “Okay, then I’ll write a series. I want to try to write this topic so that everyone who encounters CORS problems will come to see this series, and after reading it, they will know how to solve the problem.” This is my goal for this article. If the quality of the article cannot achieve this goal, I will continue to improve it.

This series consists of six articles:

• CORS Complete Guide (Part 1): Why CORS Errors Occur?
• CORS Complete Guide (Part 2): How to Solve CORS Problems?
• CORS Complete Guide (Part 3): CORS Detailed Explanation
• CORS Complete Guide (Part 4): Let’s Look at the Specification Together
• CORS Complete Guide (Part 5): Security Issues of Cross-Origin Requests
• CORS Complete Guide (Part 6): Summary, Afterword, and Leftovers

It will start from the same-origin policy, then talk about why there are errors when accessing resources across origins, and then talk about how to solve CORS-related problems correctly and incorrectly. The third article will explain in detail the detailed process of cross-origin requests, such as preflight requests.

The basic part is enough to read the first three articles, and the following will be a bit deeper. The fourth article will take you to look at the spec together, proving that the previous articles were not nonsense, and the fifth article will show you cross-origin-related regulations such as CORB (Cross-Origin Read Blocking), COEP (Cross-Origin Embedder Policy), or COOP (Cross-Origin-Opener-Policy), and related security issues. The last article will be some scattered topics and thoughts.

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