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Thursday, December 27, 2018

Removing the Server header from Kestrel hosted ASP.NET core apps

In the continuous battle of software builders against attackers, the less information the application discloses about its infrastructure the better.
One of the issues I've repetitively seen in penetration testing reports for web applications is the existence of the Server header, which as mentioned in MDN:

The Server header contains information about the software used by the origin server to handle the request.

Also as mentioned by MDN:

Overly long and detailed Server values should be avoided as they potentially reveal internal implementation details that might make it (slightly) easier for attackers to find and exploit known security holes.

By default, when using Kestrel web server to host an ASP.NET core application, Kestrel returns the Server header with the value Kestrel as shown in this screenshot from Postman:

Even though it doesn't sound like a big security risk, I just prefer to remove this header. This could be achieved by adding this line to the ConfigureServices method in the application Startup class:
services.PostConfigure(k => k.AddServerHeader = false);

The PostConfigure configurations run after all Configure methods. So it's a good place to override the default behavior.

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