New Awesomium Feature: URL Filtering System

A nifty new security feature will be coming in the next release of Awesomium– you now have complete control over what resources can be accessed by a WebView via the new URL Filtering API!

Two modes of operation are supported: a blacklist and a whitelist. Under the blacklist mode, all resource requests and page navigations are allowed except those that match the URLs you describe. For the whitelist mode, it’s the opposite: all requests and navigations are denied except those that match the URLs you describe.

To describe a URL or set of URLs, you may specify one or more strings with wildcards. So, for example, to describe all URLs with the domain “princeofcode.com”, you would specify “http://princeofcode.com/*”.

As a convenience, you may also use “local://” in your URL filter strings to describe the base directory (set via WebCore::setBaseDirectory).

This features makes it really easy to sandbox a WebView so that it may only access local resources:

myWebView->setURLFilteringMode(UFM_WHITELIST);
myWebView->addURLFilter("local://*");

Or, maybe you wish to block users from accessing some specific video sites:

myWebView->setURLFilteringMode(UFM_BLACKLIST);
myWebView->addURLFilter("http://youtube.com/*");
myWebView->addURLFilter("http://vimeo.com/*");
myWebView->addURLFilter("http://metacafe.com/*");

What’s more, the URL filtering system is extremely flexible– these modes and filters can be applied to each WebView independently and you may also modify/remove modes and filters at runtime.

Hope yall find this new feature useful, this is just one of the new security enhancements that will be coming in the next release! I’ll be revealing some new features next week, so stay tuned to this blog!