Working around the same-origin policy

As part of the basic security model of the Web, sites can’t usually make requests to pages on other domains — if they could, then just visiting any random site on the Web having recently logged in to your email could reveal the entire contents of your email to an attacker! In class we briefly mentioned three ways to work around the same-origin policy:

  1. Use a server-side proxy.
  2. Make a JSONP request to a server that supports it.
  3. Make a request from a privileged context (like in a Chrome Extension).

This blog post will cover generic uses of the first two methods. If you’re creating a standalone page for your projects, you’ll either need to use APIs that already support JSONP, or use our provided proxy to call an existing API for you and wrap it in JSONP. Ryan’s walkthrough tutorial uses a version of this technique for posting new bookmarks to Delicious from a standalone page, but here we’ll access any generic JSON API.

The internal details aren’t vitally important, but in case you’re curious: JSONP works by loading a new <script> element to the page, where the contents of that <script> element just happen to be (no, I’m kidding, it’s not the least bit coincidental) calling a function with a name you defined with a single parameter which is the response from the API. To take advantage of this in jQuery (which, as usual, does all the hard work for you), just use the $.getJSON() function and include a special callback parameter in the URL '?callback=?'.

To use this with the New York Times API, for example, which doesn’t support JSONP, we instead make a JSONP call to a proxy on our own Berkeley servers and that proxy makes the call to the New York Times and then responds using the JSONP callback standard described above. We just need to pass the URL of the New York Times API and all the query parameters as parameters to the proxy.

var query = $('#search').val();

var apiKey = 'yournytimesapikey';
var proxyUrl = 'http://courses.ischool.berkeley.edu/path/to/proxy.php';

$.getJSON(proxyUrl + '?callback=?', {"url": 'http://api.nytimes.com/svc/timestags/suggest', 
                                     "query": query, 
                                     "api-key": apiKey}, 
 function(json){
    console.log(json.results);
});

The full sample page is in the iolab10 repository, including the full path to the PHP proxy that we’re running and even a sample NYTimes API key. We’ve also made the PHP code for the proxy available in case you want to inspect it or modify it for your own purposes. (If you install and run the proxy on the same domain that your page runs on you don’t even need to use JSONP!)

A couple of caveats:

  1. If you’re using JSONP from a content script in a Chrome Extension (or from a Greasemonkey extension, for that matter), you’ll receive an error that a function named json123456789 (or some similar nonsense name) doesn’t exist. This is because jQuery created the callback function in its own sandboxed area, but when the script was inserted into the page it called a function in the original window context. To work around this, cross-domain requests in Chrome Extensions shouldn’t use '?callback=?' and should be made from the background page or a pop-up page with cross-domain permissions declared in the manifest. (For more detail, see the relevant Chrome Extensions documentation.)
  2. When you pass a URL to the proxy as the ?url= parameter, the URL itself shouldn’t include the parameters you’re passing on to the API, those parameters should just be additional parameters to the proxy page. Really, this just means that you should use an ampersand for the first parameter to the API. For example, call proxy.php?url=http://example.com&param1=value1&param2=value2 rather than proxy.php?url=http://example.com?param1=value1&param2=value2.
  3. There are potential security implications here that we haven’t gone into yet. Requests through a PHP proxy on Berkeley servers may be logged by Berkeley, which you might not want (particularly if you’re passing a key, password or other secret data). And if the address for your (or our) proxy becomes widely known, it could be abused by others for denial-of-service or other malicious purposes.

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