Security headers for Grafana

medium7 checks

Security headers are the instructions a server sends with every response. When they are missing, the browser cannot enforce protections the application actually relies on.

What Grafana must have

  • Content-Security-Policy with a per-request nonce, no 'unsafe-inline' in script-src
  • Strict-Transport-Security with max-age of at least one year and includeSubDomains
  • X-Frame-Options: DENY or CSP frame-ancestors 'none'
  • X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff on every response
  • Referrer-Policy: strict-origin-when-cross-origin
  • Permissions-Policy disabling camera, microphone and geolocation
  • Cross-Origin-Opener-Policy: same-origin

How to fix it

  1. 1Set headers in middleware or at the edge so static assets and error pages get them too
  2. 2Generate the CSP nonce per request and mirror it into the HTML through your framework's headers API
  3. 3Never test only the home page: check HTML, API and 404 responses

Grafana context

Observability dashboards for metrics and logs.

Anonymous access and default admin passwords are common; dashboards often leak internal hostnames and tokens.