X-Frame-Options

The X-Frame-Options HTTP response header can be used to indicate whether or not a browser should be allowed to render a page in a <frame>, <iframe> or <object> . Sites can use this to avoid clickjacking attacks, by ensuring that their content is not embedded into other sites.

The added security is only provided if the user accessing the document is using a browser supporting X-Frame-Options.

Syntax

There are three possible directives for X-Frame-Options:

X-Frame-Options: deny
X-Frame-Options: sameorigin
X-Frame-Options: allow-from https://example.com/

Directives

If you specify deny, not only will attempts to load the page in a frame fail when loaded from other sites, attempts to do so will fail when loaded from the same site. On the other hand, if you specify sameorigin, you can still use the page in a frame as long as the site including it in a frame is the same as the one serving the page.

deny

The page cannot be displayed in a frame, regardless of the site attempting to do so.

sameorigin

The page can only be displayed in a frame on the same origin as the page itself. The spec leaves it up to browser vendors to decide whether this option applies to the top level, the parent, or the whole chain, although it is argued that the option is not very useful unless all ancestors are also in the same origin (see bug 725490). Also see Browser compatibility for support details.

allow-from uri

The page can only be displayed in a frame on the specified origin. Note that in Firefox this still suffers from the same problem as sameorigin did — it doesn't check the frame ancestors to see if they are in the same origin.

Examples

Configuring Apache

To configure Apache to send the X-Frame-Options header for all pages, add this to your site's configuration:

Header always set X-Frame-Options "sameorigin"

To configure Apache to set the X-Frame-Options deny , add this to your site's configuration:

Header set X-Frame-Options "deny"

To configure Apache to set the X-Frame-Options to allow-from a specific Host , add this to your site's configuration:

Header set X-Frame-Options "allow-from https://example.com/"

Configuring nginx

To configure nginx to send the X-Frame-Options header, add this either to your http, server or location configuration:

add_header X-Frame-Options sameorigin;

Configuring IIS

To configure IIS to send the X-Frame-Options header, add this to your site's Web.config file:

<system.webServer>
  ...

  <httpProtocol>
    <customHeaders>
      <add name="X-Frame-Options" value="sameorigin" />
    </customHeaders>
  </httpProtocol>

  ...
</system.webServer>

Configuring HAProxy

To configure HAProxy to send the X-Frame-Options header, add this to your front-end, listen, or backend configuration:

rspadd X-Frame-Options:\ sameorigin

Specifications

Browser compatibilityUpdate compatibility data on GitHub

See also

• ClickJacking Defenses - IEBlog
• Combating ClickJacking with X-Frame-Options - IEInternals
• HTTP Header Field X-Frame-Options - RFC 7034
• CSP Level 2 frame-ancestors directive