Security recommendations

Secure your TalkJS chat by setting up and enabling authentication (identity verification). With authentication, nobody can connect to your TalkJS chats without providing a valid authentication token that was generated and digitally signed by your backend.

If your conversation IDs may be easy to predict, we suggest that you hash them with a secret so they can't be joined by strangers. Alternatively, disable browser synchronization altogether and synchronize all data via the REST API.

We recommend you verify the authenticity of webhook events sent to your webhook endpoint. Each TalkJS webhook event is sent with the X-TalkJS-Signature and X-TalkJS-Timestamp header fields; these can be used along with your secret key marked as "use for webhooks" to verify the integrity and authenticity of TalkJS webhook events by checking the signature as shown below (pseudocode):

1received_signature = header['X-TalkJS-Signature'];
2timestamp = header['X-TalkJS-Timestamp'];
3
4// The raw_post_body MUST be the full byte-for-byte HTTP POST body
5payload = timestamp + '.' + raw_post_body;
6// Generate a HMAC-SHA256 signature of the payload. The result should be encoded as uppercase hexadecimal characters (A-Z0-9).
7valid_signature = HMAC_SHA256(your_secret_key, payload);
8
9if (valid_signature === received_signature) {
10  // Authentic webhook request
11  // do something with the event
12} else {
13  // The integrity check failed, discard the event
14}

Content Security Policy (CSP) is a security layer that helps to detect and protect against certain types of attacks like XSS or clickjacking. If you want to secure your application, which we recommend, then please follow the instructions presented on Content Security Policy.