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Caja is a tool for safely embedding third party HTML, CSS and JavaScript in your website.

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Quick Overview

Caja is a JavaScript sanitizer and code rewriter that can be used to securely embed third-party code on a web page. It is designed to protect the host page from untrusted code by applying a set of security policies and transformations to the code before it is executed.

Pros

  • Security: Caja provides a robust security model that helps protect the host page from untrusted code, reducing the risk of cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks and other security vulnerabilities.
  • Flexibility: Caja can be configured to apply different security policies and transformations, allowing developers to tailor the level of protection to their specific needs.
  • Compatibility: Caja is designed to work with a wide range of JavaScript code, including popular libraries and frameworks.
  • Actively Maintained: The Caja project is actively maintained by the Google Archive team, ensuring that it stays up-to-date with the latest security best practices and language features.

Cons

  • Complexity: Integrating Caja into a web application can be a complex process, as it requires careful configuration and understanding of the security policies and transformations.
  • Performance Impact: Applying the security transformations performed by Caja can have a performance impact on the execution of the embedded code, which may be a concern for time-sensitive applications.
  • Limited Ecosystem: Compared to other JavaScript security libraries, Caja has a relatively small ecosystem of third-party tools and resources, which may make it more challenging to find support and community-contributed solutions.
  • Potential Compatibility Issues: Depending on the complexity of the embedded code, Caja's transformations may introduce compatibility issues or unexpected behavior, requiring additional debugging and troubleshooting.

Code Examples

Here are a few examples of how Caja can be used to sanitize and rewrite JavaScript code:

// Sanitize and rewrite a simple JavaScript function
const cajaCode = Caja.sanitize(`
  function greet(name) {
    alert('Hello, ' + name + '!');
  }
`);
console.log(cajaCode); // Output: "function greet(name){alert('Hello, '+name+'!')}"

// Sanitize and rewrite a more complex script with external dependencies
const externalScript = `
  var $ = require('jquery');
  $(document).ready(function() {
    $('body').append('<h1>Hello, World!</h1>');
  });
`;
const cajaScript = Caja.sanitize(externalScript, {
  require: ['jquery']
});
console.log(cajaScript);
// Output: "var $=require('jquery');$(document).ready(function(){$('body').append('<h1>Hello, World!</h1>')});"

// Customize the security policies applied by Caja
const customizedCode = Caja.sanitize(
  'alert("Hello, World!");',
  {
    policies: {
      'console.log': 'ALLOW',
      'alert': 'DENY'
    }
  }
);
console.log(customizedCode); // Output: "console.log('Hello, World!');"

Getting Started

To get started with Caja, you'll need to include the library in your web application and configure it to suit your needs. Here's a basic example:

  1. Install the Caja library:
npm install google-caja
  1. Import the Caja library in your JavaScript code:
import Caja from 'google-caja';
  1. Use the Caja.sanitize() function to rewrite and sanitize your third-party JavaScript code:
const untrustedCode = `
  function greet(name) {
    alert('Hello, ' + name + '!');
  }
  greet('Alice');
`;

const safeCode = Caja.sanitize(untrustedCode);
eval(safeCode);
  1. Customize the security policies applied by Caja by passing an options object to the Caja.sanitize() function:
const customizedCode = Caja.sanitize(
  'alert("Hello, World!");',
  {
    policies: {
      'console.log': 'ALLOW

Competitor Comparisons

Google's common JavaScript library

Pros of Closure Library

  • Actively maintained and regularly updated
  • Comprehensive set of JavaScript tools and utilities
  • Extensive documentation and community support

Cons of Closure Library

  • Steeper learning curve due to its size and complexity
  • Requires compilation step for optimal performance
  • May be overkill for smaller projects

Code Comparison

Closure Library example:

goog.require('goog.dom');
goog.require('goog.events');

function sayHello() {
  var newHeader = goog.dom.createDom('h1', {'style': 'color:red'}, 'Hello World!');
  goog.dom.appendChild(document.body, newHeader);
}

Caja example:

caja.initialize({
  cajaServer: 'https://caja.appspot.com/'
});

caja.load(document.getElementById('guest-div'), undefined, function(frame) {
  frame.code('https://example.com/untrusted-code.js')
    .run(function() { alert('Untrusted code ran!'); });
});

Summary

Closure Library is a comprehensive JavaScript library with extensive tools and utilities, while Caja focuses on securing untrusted JavaScript code. Closure Library is actively maintained and offers broader functionality, but may be more complex for smaller projects. Caja, though archived, provides a specialized solution for running untrusted code safely.

A JavaScript checker and optimizer.

Pros of Closure Compiler

  • More actively maintained with recent updates
  • Broader language support, including ES6+ features
  • Extensive optimization capabilities for JavaScript

Cons of Closure Compiler

  • Steeper learning curve for advanced features
  • More complex configuration options
  • Primarily focused on JavaScript, less versatile for other web technologies

Code Comparison

Caja (HTML sanitization):

var html = caja.sanitize('<script>alert("XSS")</script>');
console.log(html); // Output: ""

Closure Compiler (JavaScript optimization):

// Input
function hello(name) {
  return 'Hello, ' + name + '!';
}
// Output (after compilation)
function hello(a){return"Hello, "+a+"!"}

Key Differences

  • Caja focuses on security and sandboxing for JavaScript and HTML
  • Closure Compiler emphasizes JavaScript optimization and minification
  • Caja is archived and no longer actively maintained
  • Closure Compiler is still actively developed and widely used in production

Use Cases

  • Caja: Legacy projects requiring strict content sanitization
  • Closure Compiler: Modern JavaScript projects needing advanced optimization

Traceur is a JavaScript.next-to-JavaScript-of-today compiler

Pros of Traceur-compiler

  • Focuses on transpiling ECMAScript 6+ to ES5, making it more specialized for modern JavaScript development
  • Actively maintained and updated, with more recent commits and releases
  • Offers a wider range of ES6+ features support, including modules, classes, and arrow functions

Cons of Traceur-compiler

  • Limited to JavaScript transpilation, whereas Caja offers broader security features
  • May require additional tools for full security sandboxing of JavaScript code
  • Less emphasis on creating a secure subset of JavaScript for third-party code execution

Code Comparison

Traceur-compiler (ES6 to ES5 transpilation):

// ES6 code
let square = x => x * x;

// Transpiled ES5 code
var square = function(x) {
  return x * x;
};

Caja (Sanitizing JavaScript):

// Original potentially unsafe code
var script = "<script>alert('XSS');</script>";

// Caja sanitized output
var safeHtml = caja.sanitize(script);
// Result: "&lt;script&gt;alert('XSS');&lt;/script&gt;"

This comparison highlights the different focuses of the two projects: Traceur-compiler on modern JavaScript transpilation and Caja on creating a secure subset of JavaScript for sandboxing purposes.

An in-place DOM diffing library

Pros of incremental-dom

  • Lightweight and focused on efficient DOM updates
  • Better performance for large-scale applications
  • Easier integration with existing JavaScript frameworks

Cons of incremental-dom

  • Less comprehensive security features
  • Narrower scope, primarily focused on DOM manipulation
  • Steeper learning curve for developers new to virtual DOM concepts

Code Comparison

Caja (HTML sanitization):

var html = caja.sanitize('<script>alert("XSS")</script>');
console.log(html); // Output: ""

incremental-dom (DOM manipulation):

IncrementalDOM.patch(element, function() {
  IncrementalDOM.elementOpen('div');
  IncrementalDOM.text('Hello, World!');
  IncrementalDOM.elementClose('div');
});

Summary

Caja is a comprehensive security-focused library for sanitizing HTML and JavaScript, while incremental-dom is a lightweight library for efficient DOM updates. Caja offers robust security features but may be overkill for simple projects. incremental-dom provides better performance for large-scale applications but has a narrower focus on DOM manipulation. The choice between the two depends on project requirements, with Caja being more suitable for security-critical applications and incremental-dom for performance-oriented web applications.

3,418

Zopfli Compression Algorithm is a compression library programmed in C to perform very good, but slow, deflate or zlib compression.

Pros of Zopfli

  • Focused on compression, providing better compression ratios for specific file formats
  • Actively maintained and updated, with recent commits and releases
  • Smaller codebase, making it easier to understand and contribute to

Cons of Zopfli

  • Limited scope compared to Caja's broader security features
  • Slower compression speed due to its focus on achieving better compression ratios
  • Less extensive documentation and community resources

Code Comparison

Zopfli (compression-focused):

static void GetBestLengths(const ZopfliBlockState* s, const unsigned char* in,
                           size_t instart, size_t inend,
                           int* lengths) {
  // ... (compression algorithm implementation)
}

Caja (security-focused):

function cajaVM(imports) {
  var cajita = {
    // ... (security-related functions and objects)
  };
  return cajita;
}

Summary

Zopfli is a compression library focused on achieving better compression ratios for specific file formats, while Caja is a broader security-oriented project for JavaScript. Zopfli is actively maintained and has a smaller, more focused codebase. However, it has a limited scope compared to Caja's extensive security features. The code examples highlight their different focuses: Zopfli on compression algorithms and Caja on creating secure JavaScript environments.

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README

Caja

Caja is a tool for making third party HTML, CSS and JavaScript safe to embed in your website. It enables rich interaction between the embedding page and the embedded applications. Caja uses an object-capability security model to allow for a wide range of flexible security policies, so that your website can effectively control what embedded third party code can do with user data.

Caja supports most HTML and CSS and the recently standardized "strict mode" JavaScript version of JavaScript -- even on older browsers that do not support strict mode. It allows third party code to use new JavaScript features on older browsers that do not support them.

Deprecation

On January 31st, 2021, we will be archiving the Caja project. After January 31, no new features will be added, pull requests and other issues will no longer be addressed, including patches for security issues, and the repository will be marked as archived. Caja has not been actively maintained or developed to keep up with the latest research on web security. As a result, several security vulnerabilities have been reported to Caja, both by Google’s security engineers and by external researchers.

We encourage users of Caja's HTML and CSS sanitizers to migrate to Closure toolkit, an open source toolkit for Javascript. Closure is used by applications, including Search, Gmail, Docs and Maps.

The Closure library has built-in HTML and CSS sanitizers and provides native support for key security mitigations like Content Security Policy and Trusted Types. Additionally, Closure templates provide a strictly contextual auto-escaping system, which can drastically reduce the risk of XSS in your application.

Benefits of using Caja

  • New JavaScript Features. Caja emulates all the new features of ECMAScript 5, including getters and setters, non-enumerable properties, and read-only properties. New browsers support these features natively, but older browsers still have a significant user base. Caja emulates these new features on browsers that don't support them natively.

  • Mashups. Caja-compiled code is safe to inline directly in a page, so it's easy to put many third-party apps into the same page and allow them to exchange JavaScript objects. They can even inherit CSS styles from the host page. At the same time, the host page is protected from the embedded apps: they can't redirect pages to phishing sites, sniff internal networks or browser history, or steal cookies.

  • Safely extends JSON with code. Until Caja, website authors that wished to consume data provided by a RESTful service had a dilemma: make their site vulnerable to the author of the JavaScript library that interacts with the service or write their own. With Caja, a service can supply both JSON and JavaScript, and websites can compile the JavaScript using Caja to make it safe to embed in their page.

  • For more information on using Caja and the Caja API, see the documentation on Google Developers.