Overcoming “Display forbidden by X-Frame-Options”

Question

I'm writing a tiny webpage whose purpose is to frame a few other pages, simply to consolidate them into a single browser window for ease of viewing. A few of the pages I'm trying to frame forbid being framed and throw a "Refused to display document because display forbidden by X-Frame-Options." error in Chrome. I understand that this is a security limitation (for good reason), and don't have access to change it.

Is there any alternative framing or non-framing method to display pages within a single window that won't get tripped up by the X-Frame-Options header?

Answer 1

I was using Tomcat 8.0.30, none of the suggestions worked for me. As we are looking to update the X-Frame-Options and set it to ALLOW, here is how I configured to allow embed iframes:

• Navigate to Tomcat conf directory, edit the web.xml file
• Add the below filter:

<filter>
            <filter-name>httpHeaderSecurity</filter-name>
            <filter-class>org.apache.catalina.filters.HttpHeaderSecurityFilter</filter-class>
                   <init-param>
                           <param-name>hstsEnabled</param-name>
                           <param-value>true</param-value>
                   </init-param>
                   <init-param>
                           <param-name>antiClickJackingEnabled</param-name>
                           <param-value>true</param-value>
                   </init-param>
                   <init-param>
                           <param-name>antiClickJackingOption</param-name>
                           <param-value>ALLOW-FROM</param-value>
                   </init-param>
            <async-supported>true</async-supported>
       </filter>

       <filter-mapping>
                   <filter-name>httpHeaderSecurity</filter-name>
                   <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
                   <dispatcher>REQUEST</dispatcher>
       </filter-mapping> 

• Restart Tomcat service
• Access the resources using an iFrame.

Answer 2

FWIW:

We had a situation where we needed to kill our iFrame when this "breaker" code showed up. So, I used the PHP function get_headers($url); to check out the remote URL before showing it in an iFrame. For better performance, I cached the results to a file so I was not making a HTTP connection each time.

Answer 3

I had a similar issue, where I was trying to display content from our own site in an iframe (as a lightbox-style dialog with Colorbox), and where we had an server-wide "X-Frame-Options SAMEORIGIN" header on the source server preventing it from loading on our test server.

This doesn't seem to be documented anywhere, but if you can edit the pages you're trying to iframe (eg., they're your own pages), simply sending another X-Frame-Options header with any string at all disables the SAMEORIGIN or DENY commands.

eg. for PHP, putting

<?php
    header('X-Frame-Options: GOFORIT'); 
?>

at the top of your page will make browsers combine the two, which results in a header of

X-Frame-Options SAMEORIGIN, GOFORIT

...and allows you to load the page in an iframe. This seems to work when the initial SAMEORIGIN command was set at a server level, and you'd like to override it on a page-by-page case.

All the best!

Answer 4

The only real answer, if you don't control the headers on your source you want in your iframe, is to proxy it. Have a server act as a client, receive the source, strip the problematic headers, add CORS if needed, and then ping your own server.

There is one other answer explaining how to write such a proxy. It isn't difficult, but I was sure someone had to have done this before. It was just difficult to find it, for some reason.

I finally did find some sources:

https://github.com/Rob--W/cors-anywhere/#documentation

^ preferred. If you need rare usage, I think you can just use his heroku app. Otherwise, it's code to run it yourself on your own server. Note sure what the limits are.

whateverorigin.org

^ second choice, but quite old. supposedly newer choice in python: https://github.com/Eiledon/alloworigin

then there's the third choice:

http://anyorigin.com/

Which seems to allow a little free usage, but will put you on a public shame list if you don't pay and use some unspecified amount, which you can only be removed from if you pay the fee...

Answer 5

I tried nearly all suggestions. However, the only thing that really solved the issue was:

1. Create an .htaccess in the same folder where your PHP file lies.

2. Add this line to the htaccess:

   Header always unset X-Frame-Options

Embedding the PHP by an iframe from another domain should work afterwards.

Additionally you could add in the beginning of your PHP file:

header('X-Frame-Options: ALLOW');

Which was, however, not necessary in my case.

Answer 6

target='_parent'

Using Kevin Vella's idea, I tried adding that attribute to form elements made by PayPal's button generator. Worked for me so that Paypal does not open in a new browser window/tab.