React MUI Content Security Policy

Material-UI is a user interface library that provides predefined and customizable React components for faster and easy web development, these Material-UI components are based on top of Material Design by Google. In this article let’s discuss the Hidden component in the Material-UI library.
When using Material-UI (also known as MUI) with React, it's important to set up a Content Security Policy (CSP) to ensure that your app is secure against cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks. A set of rules that specify which content can be loaded by web page is known as CSP. It helps to prevent XSS attacks on the web page.

const csp = `
  default-src 'self';
  script-src 'self';
  style-src 'self';
`;

Basic Setup: Follow the below steps to create the application.

Step 1: Create a folder called example. Open your command prompt and navigate to the example folder. Now type in the following command

npx create-react-app

Step 2: Create a folder called component inside the src folder. Inside that component, create a file called Main.js.

cd src
mkdir component
touch Main.js

Step 3: Again, in the same folder, open the command prompt and type in the following command to install React MUI library.

npm install @mui/material @emotion/react @emotion/styled

Step 4: Install the React 'helmet' library.

npm install helmet
npm install react-helmet
npm install react-helmet-async

Step 5: Importing the 'helmet' library.

import { Helmet } from "react-helmet";

Project Structure: Once the installation is complete, you will have the modules required. Your folder structure should look something like this.

Example 1: Setting up a CSP with React MUI using the 'helmet' library. It is used as the document head manager for React-based applications.

• App.js

import React from "react";
import Main from "./component/Main";
import { Helmet } from "react-helmet";

const csp = `
  default-src 'self';
  script-src 'self' 'unsafe-inline';
  style-src 'self' 'unsafe-inline';
  img-src 'self' data:;
  font-src 'self' data:;
`;

console.log({ csp });

const App = () => {
    return (
        <>
            <Helmet>
                <meta http-equiv="Content-Security-Policy" content={csp} />
            </Helmet>

            <Main />
        </>
    );
};

export default App;

• Main.js

import React from "react";

function Main() {
    return (
        <>
            <div>
                GeeksforGeeks
                <br />
                Content Security Policy in MUI
            </div>
        </>
    );
}

export default Main;

Step to run the application: Open your command prompt in the same folder, and type in the following command

npm start

Output:

Example 2: Setting up CSP using the 'react-helmet-async' library.

• App.js

import React from 'react';
import Main from './component/Main';
import { HelmetProvider } from 'react-helmet-async';
import { CssBaseline } from '@material-ui/core';

function App(){
  return(
    <>
      <HelmetProvider>

        <CssBaseline />
        <Main/>

      </HelmetProvider>
    </>
  );
};

export default App;

• Main.js

import React from 'react';
import { Helmet } from 'react-helmet-async';
import { Button } from '@material-ui/core';

function Main() {
  return (
    <>
      <Helmet>
        <meta
          http-equiv="Content-Security-Policy"
          content="
            default-src 'self';
            script-src 'self' 'unsafe-inline' 'unsafe-eval';
            style-src 'self' 'unsafe-inline';
            font-src 'self' data:;
            img-src 'self' data:;
          "
        />
      </Helmet>
      <Button variant="contained" color="primary">
        Hello, World!
      </Button>
    </>
  );
}

export default Main;

Output:

This sets the 'Content-Security-Policy' header to allow resources to be loaded only from the same origin ('self'), and also allows inline scripts and styles.

Connect me on Twitter:- Twitter 🤝🏻

Do check out my GitHub for amazing projects:- GitHub 🤝🏻

Connect me on LinkedIn:- Linkedin 🤝🏻

Comments

[Aryan Dev Shourie]

Great content!

[Ritesh Kumar]

Nice post

[Ellis]

Hi. Asking because I don't know :)

When using Material-UI (also known as MUI) with React, it's important to set up a Content Security Policy (CSP) to ensure that your app is secure against cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks.

Why? What does a user interface library have to do with security? And why more so than any other library?