This article takes an honest look at the features of Report URI.
Since you’re on the c/side website, we acknowledge our bias. That said, we’ve built our case honestly and based our analysis on publicly available information, industry information, and our own or our customers' experiences.
If you want to verify their claims yourself, please navigate to their product pages.
What is Report URI?
Report URI is a reporting platform that collects browser-generated security violation reports and helps teams monitor and fine-tune their web and email security policies. It primarily supports Content Security Policy (CSP) reporting, which is by far the most common use case next to their SMPT email security service.
How Report URI works
Businesses need to configure their HTTP security headers to point to their unique Report URI endpoint. For example, with a Content Security Policy (CSP), they include a report-uri or report-to directive in the header that tells browsers where to send violation data.
CSP is almost entirely what Report URI provides. While a common used security system, it's often not robust enough to handle client-side attacks.
A CSP acts like a firewall which only trusts pre-approved script sources, not their content. Should the source stay the same but the content changes, like in the biggest client-side attack of 2024 – Polyfill – a CSP won’t catch it.
We wrote an in depth article on Why CSP Doesn’t Work in regards to providing the best client-side security solution:
CSP operates on an allow-list model, which permits resources from trusted domains but cannot block individual scripts or resources from those domains.
Report URI doesn’t block anything itself. It just receives reports from the browser and gives teams visibility into violations and misconfigurations. It all relies on native browser behavior.
Report URI also offers email security. SMTP-TLSRPT is a reporting standard that lets mail servers send reports about email transport encryption issues (i.e. STARTTLS failures). If you're using MTA-STS (Mail Transfer Agent Strict Transport Security), browsers or receiving servers can generate reports about delivery failures or downgrade attacks and send them to a specified endpoint.
So just like with CSP for browsers, you add a header (or DNS TXT record) to your mail domain that points to a Report URI endpoint, and it will collect and display those SMTP reports.
Report URI also supports other browser reporting mechanisms like Subresource Integrity (SRI) failures, Network Error Logging (NEL), Cross-Origin policies (COOP and COEP), and deprecated feature usage.
The most adjacent features to c/side would be Report URI Script Watch, which tracks the presence and changes of third-party JavaScript on your site, and Data Watch, which detects when sensitive form fields may be exposed to third-party code. Both run on the same CPS-based system and seems to be product names.
c/side however, uses a proxy approach which sits in between every actual user session. It checks the actual payload of every page view, and analyzes the served dependencies code in real-time before serving it to the user.
This allows us to not only spot 0-day attacks and alert, c/side also makes it possible to block attacks before they touch the user’s browser. It also checks the box for multiple compliance frameworks, including PCI DSS 4.0.1
We believe this is the most secure way to monitor and protect your dependencies across your entire website.
Sign up or book a demo to get started.