I know it's impossible to hide source code but, for example, if I have to link a JavaScript file from my CDN to a web page and I don't want the people to know the location and/or content of this script, is this possible?
For example, to link a script from a website, we use:
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://somedomain.example/scriptxyz.js">
</script>
Now, is possible to hide from the user where the script comes from, or hide the script content and still use it on a web page?
For example, by saving it in my private CDN that needs password to access files, would that work? If not, what would work to get what I want?
Good question with a simple answer: you can't!
JavaScript is a client-side programming language, therefore it works on the client's machine, so you can't actually hide anything from the client.
Obfuscating your code is a good solution, but it's not enough, because, although it is hard, someone could decipher your code and "steal" your script.
There are a few ways of making your code hard to be stolen, but as I said nothing is bullet-proof.
Off the top of my head, one idea is to restrict access to your external js files from outside the page you embed your code in. In that case, if you have
<script type="text/javascript" src="myJs.js"></script>
and someone tries to access the myJs.js file in browser, he shouldn't be granted any access to the script source.
For example, if your page is written in PHP, you can include the script via the include function and let the script decide if it's safe" to return it's source.
In this example, you'll need the external "js" (written in PHP) file myJs.php:
<?php
$URL = $_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'].$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
if ($URL != "my-domain.example/my-page.php")
die("/\*sry, no acces rights\*/");
?>
// your obfuscated script goes here
that would be included in your main page my-page.php:
<script type="text/javascript">
<?php include "myJs.php"; ?>;
</script>
This way, only the browser could see the js file contents.
Another interesting idea is that at the end of your script, you delete the contents of your dom script element, so that after the browser evaluates your code, the code disappears:
<script id="erasable" type="text/javascript">
//your code goes here
document.getElementById('erasable').innerHTML = "";
</script>
These are all just simple hacks that cannot, and I can't stress this enough: cannot, fully protect your js code, but they can sure piss off someone who is trying to "steal" your code.
Update:
I recently came across a very interesting article written by Patrick Weid on how to hide your js code, and he reveals a different approach: you can encode your source code into an image! Sure, that's not bullet proof either, but it's another fence that you could build around your code.
The idea behind this approach is that most browsers can use the canvas element to do pixel manipulation on images. And since the canvas pixel is represented by 4 values (rgba), each pixel can have a value in the range of 0-255. That means that you can store a character (actual it's ascii code) in every pixel. The rest of the encoding/decoding is trivial.
The only thing you can do is obfuscate your code to make it more difficult to read. No matter what you do, if you want the javascript to execute in their browser they'll have to have the code.
Just off the top of my head, you could do something like this (if you can create server-side scripts, which it sounds like you can):
Instead of loading the script like normal, send an AJAX request to a PHP page (it could be anything; I just use it myself). Have the PHP locate the file (maybe on a non-public part of the server), open it with file_get_contents, and return (read: echo) the contents as a string.
When this string returns to the JavaScript, have it create a new script tag, populate its innerHTML with the code you just received, and attach the tag to the page. (You might have trouble with this; innerHTML may not be what you need, but you can experiment.)
If you do this a lot, you might even want to set up a PHP page that accepts a GET variable with the script's name, so that you can dynamically grab different scripts using the same PHP. (Maybe you could use POST instead, to make it just a little harder for other people to see what you're doing. I don't know.)
EDIT: I thought you were only trying to hide the location of the script. This obviously wouldn't help much if you're trying to hide the script itself.
Google Closure Compiler, YUI compressor, Minify, /Packer/... etc, are options for compressing/obfuscating your JS codes. But none of them can help you from hiding your code from the users.
Anyone with decent knowledge can easily decode/de-obfuscate your code using tools like JS Beautifier. You name it.
So the answer is, you can always make your code harder to read/decode, but for sure there is no way to hide.
Forget it, this is not doable.
No matter what you try it will not work. All a user needs to do to discover your code and it's location is to look in the net tab in firebug or use fiddler to see what requests are being made.
From my knowledge, this is not possible.
Your browser has to have access to JS files to be able to execute them. If the browser has access, then browser's user also has access.
If you password protect your JS files, then the browser won't be able to access them, defeating the purpose of having JS in the first place.
I think the only way is to put required data on the server and allow only logged-in user to access the data as required (you can also make some calculations server side). This wont protect your javascript code but make it unoperatable without the server side code
I agree with everyone else here: With JS on the client, the cat is out of the bag and there is nothing completely foolproof that can be done.
Having said that; in some cases I do this to put some hurdles in the way of those who want to take a look at the code. This is how the algorithm works (roughly)
The server creates 3 hashed and salted values. One for the current timestamp, and the other two for each of the next 2 seconds. These values are sent over to the client via Ajax to the client as a comma delimited string; from my PHP module. In some cases, I think you can hard-bake these values into a script section of HTML when the page is formed, and delete that script tag once the use of the hashes is over The server is CORS protected and does all the usual SERVER_NAME etc check (which is not much of a protection but at least provides some modicum of resistance to script kiddies).
Also it would be nice, if the the server checks if there was indeed an authenticated user's client doing this
The client then sends the same 3 hashed values back to the server thru an ajax call to fetch the actual JS that I need. The server checks the hashes against the current time stamp there... The three values ensure that the data is being sent within the 3 second window to account for latency between the browser and the server
The server needs to be convinced that one of the hashes is
matched correctly; and if so it would send over the crucial JS back
to the client. This is a simple, crude "One time use Password"
without the need for any database at the back end.
This means, that any hacker has only the 3 second window period since the generation of the first set of hashes to get to the actual JS code.
The entire client code can be inside an IIFE function so some of the variables inside the client are even more harder to read from the Inspector console
This is not any deep solution: A determined hacker can register, get an account and then ask the server to generate the first three hashes; by doing tricks to go around Ajax and CORS; and then make the client perform the second call to get to the actual code -- but it is a reasonable amount of work.
Moreover, if the Salt used by the server is based on the login credentials; the server may be able to detect who is that user who tried to retreive the sensitive JS (The server needs to do some more additional work regarding the behaviour of the user AFTER the sensitive JS was retreived, and block the person if the person, say for example, did not do some other activity which was expected)
An old, crude version of this was done for a hackathon here: http://planwithin.com/demo/tadr.html That wil not work in case the server detects too much latency, and it goes beyond the 3 second window period
As I said in the comment I left on gion_13 answer before (please read), you really can't. Not with javascript.
If you don't want the code to be available client-side (= stealable without great efforts),
my suggestion would be to make use of PHP (ASP,Python,Perl,Ruby,JSP + Java-Servlets) that is processed server-side and only the results of the computation/code execution are served to the user. Or, if you prefer, even Flash or a Java-Applet that let client-side computation/code execution but are compiled and thus harder to reverse-engine (not impossible thus).
Just my 2 cents.
You can also set up a mime type for application/JavaScript to run as PHP, .NET, Java, or whatever language you're using. I've done this for dynamic CSS files in the past.
I know that this is the wrong time to be answering this question but i just thought of something
i know it might be stressful but atleast it might still work
Now the trick is to create a lot of server side encoding scripts, they have to be decodable(for example a script that replaces all vowels with numbers and add the letter 'a' to every consonant so that the word 'bat' becomes ba1ta) then create a script that will randomize between the encoding scripts and create a cookie with the name of the encoding script being used (quick tip: try not to use the actual name of the encoding script for the cookie for example if our cookie is name 'encoding_script_being_used' and the randomizing script chooses an encoding script named MD10 try not to use MD10 as the value of the cookie but 'encoding_script4567656' just to prevent guessing) then after the cookie has been created another script will check for the cookie named 'encoding_script_being_used' and get the value, then it will determine what encoding script is being used.
Now the reason for randomizing between the encoding scripts was that the server side language will randomize which script to use to decode your javascript.js and then create a session or cookie to know which encoding scripts was used
then the server side language will also encode your javascript .js and put it as a cookie
so now let me summarize with an example
PHP randomizes between a list of encoding scripts and encrypts javascript.js then it create a cookie telling the client side language which encoding script was used then client side language decodes the javascript.js cookie(which is obviously encoded)
so people can't steal your code
but i would not advise this because
it is a long process
It is too stressful
use nwjs i think helpful it can compile to bin then you can use it to make win,mac and linux application
This method partially works if you do not want to expose the most sensible part of your algorithm.
Create WebAssembly modules (.wasm), import them, and expose only your JS, etc... workflow. In this way the algorithm is protected since it is extremely difficult to revert assembly code into a more human readable format.
After having produced the wasm module and imported correclty, you can use your code as you normallt do:
<body id="wasm-example">
<script type="module">
import init from "./pkg/glue_code.js";
init().then(() => {
console.log("WASM Loaded");
});
</script>
</body>
I have an index (fscrawler) of pdfs, docs and spreadsheets. I wrote a php script to search the index and display the contents of the documents (opens up in a modal). Below is the code to open the modal with the documents details. However I am unable to view the documents,
I would like to preserver the documents original format(indentations and bolds). kindly advice.
<button type="button" onclick="searchDetails('<?php echo $r['_source']['file']['filename']; ?>',
'<?php header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8');
echo htmlentities( $r['_source']['content']); ?>',
'<?php echo addslashes($r['_source']['path']['real']); ?>',
'<?php echo $q ?>')"
class="btn btn-info btn-sm openBtn" data-toggle="modal" > Details </button>
Catching the syntax errors in the browser console is a good first step. Next, look at the source of the rendered page. As a PHP developer, your job is to output valid html, css, and in your case JavaScript to get your page to render. When you get a Syntax Error in the console, that means JavaScript. It runs browser side so it has to be debugged in the browser.
What you're trying to do here is write out a JavaScript invocation of the JavaScript searchDetails() function. But what are you hoping to accomplish with the php header call? I dont know what searchDetails does, but header applies to the page php is rendering. It wouldn't apply to the file content. You can have a Content-Type header for the webpage, but you can't put a header in a JavaScript string. You can put the string value of a header in JavaScript but that won't actually describe the content-type of anything to the browser.
I suppose htmlentities might be sufficient to expose the content of your files, but pdfs, docs, and spreadsheets are going to look very funky that way. not sure exactly what you want it to look like, but you're probably going to want to serve the content of these files with distinct http requests so they can have distinct headers (esp Content-Type). I can't make sense of how htmlentities(spreadsheet_content) would be a valuable string to display.
Generally speaking, rendering JavaScript from php (or any templating thing) is a pattern I suggest you avoid. Write static JavaScript and have a clear mechanism to expose data to JavaScript. It's fraught with difficulties, including being very difficult to write (quoting and escaping for js, php, html all in the same code ) and debug (eg your syntax error), and often fails to be robust in the face of further development.
I would probably generate a json file that described the file data and then would read that through JavaScript and render the page from it with a js library, probably Vue.js. As I mentioned I would build a separate php resource for serving the file content so I could add a ContentType header on that. If you do this, make absolutely sure you're not serving files outside of your index. It might be wise to request files from their position in the index if possible rather than by path to avoid requests exposing eg /etc/shadow.
If you want to make webpages think of that as primarily JavaScript centered development. Use PHP to generate data but try to keep your HTML and JS as static as possible. Choose a JavaScript library - do not fall into the trap of thinking raw js is "simpler" or "more straightforward"; it's not. If you don't have a preference I recommend Vue but Angular, React, even d3.js would all work here. Your data contracts will be more explicit and you'll be able to develop the backend and the frontend in isolation, providing some confidence that the backend works as you hack out JavaScript end. This might seem like a big complication to break things out this way, but if you give it a try, I think you'll experience pretty quickly how much easier it is.
If a directory on a webserver doesn't have any html files (e.g. index.html), then when you navigate to that url, typically you just see a list of the files in that directory (unless .htaccess was changed to prevent this). Is it possible to get a list of these files in javascript?
you can do it with a get_files function
var files;
function getFilesInFolder(folderServerRelativeUrl) {
var context = SP.ClientContext.get_current();
var web = context.get_web();
var folder = web.getFolderByServerRelativeUrl(folderServerRelativeUrl);
files = folder.get_files();
context.load(files);
context.executeQueryAsync(Function.createDelegate(this, this.OnSuccess), Function.createDelegate(this, this.OnFailure));
}
Any time you write code to display something on the web, you are using a server-side language. HTML is a server-side language, but has extremely limited programming capabilities - can't read the server file system, cannot loop, etc.
So, to do what you are asking you need a server-side language. Either PHP or node.js or Python etc. Almost all webhosts already include PHP, but you can now find some (a2, webhostpython) with the other two. There are TONS of tutorials online for doing what you want with PHP. Tons.
So, to be clear, if you want to code your server-side in javascript, you need to have node.js installed on that server. To use PHP, it's almost certainly already there.
PHP files are identical to HTML files, except they end in .php instead of .html, which allows them to process PHP code between the <?php and ?> tags. Generally, PHP files are either pure PHP-only, OR they are a mix of HTML and PHP, with the PHP code included on the page between these tags.
Here is a basic tutorial to give you an idea how it would work:
https://daveismyname.blog/creating-an-image-gallery-from-a-folder-of-images-automatically
What you can do is create an endpoint that would point out all the files that you need to display and make an API call to the endpoint using JS
I have more that 15 (.js) files in my web page. I need to know is there any other and efficient way to manage java script(.js) files in an HTML or jsp page other than putting all .js files in script tag ?
There are a few different ways to do this, First one as mentioned is to combine them.. Another way is to user server side code to combine them during execution time.
SIMPLE PHP EXAMPLE: myscripts.php
<?php
header('Content-Type: application/javascript');
echo file_get_contents("scripts/script1.js");
echo file_get_contents("scripts/script2.js");
echo file_get_contents("scripts/script3.js");
echo file_get_contents("scripts/script4.js");
?>
By using the above method, you can still manage your scripts easily and have them appear as only one script in your site / page.. Simple use the above with something like
<script src="myscripts.php"></script>
If you do not have a server side language (which generally would mean this is not a hosted page), then you are very limited with options. So that would be the first one i would suggest.
Also,, forgot the one that google use.. Use a single script that includes the others by adding a script tag to the body of your page..
There are a few ways to optimize your website if you have too many js files.
Combining scripts into a single file
Minify scripts: this helps reducing file size
Using a script loader like Headjs
Ofcourse there are other approaches to solving this issue based on the specific scenario. I've just named a few which are common.