X-XSS-Protection: 0
X-XSS-Protection: 1
X-XSS-Protection: 1; mode=block
X-XSS-Protection: 1; report=<reporting-uri>

0

Disables XSS filtering.

1

Enables XSS filtering (usually default in browsers). If a cross-site scripting attack is detected, the browser will sanitize the page (remove the unsafe parts).

1; mode=block

Enables XSS filtering. Rather than sanitizing the page, the browser will prevent rendering of the page if an attack is detected.

1; report=<reporting-URI> (Chromium only)

Enables XSS filtering. If a cross-site scripting attack is detected, the browser will sanitize the page and report the violation. This uses the functionality of the CSP report-uri directive to send a report.

Consider the following excerpt of HTML code for a webpage:

<script>
  var productionMode = true;
</script>
<!-- [...] -->
<script>
  if (!window.productionMode) {
    // Some vulnerable debug code
  }
</script>

This code is completely safe if the browser doesn't perform XSS filtering. However, if it does and the search query is ?something=%3Cscript%3Evar%20productionMode%20%3D%20true%3B%3C%2Fscript%3E, the browser might execute the scripts in the page ignoring <script>var productionMode = true;</script> (thinking the server included it in the response because it was in the URI), causing window.productionMode to be evaluated to undefined and executing the unsafe debug code.

Setting the X-XSS-Protection header to either 0 or 1; mode=block prevents vulnerabilities like the one described above. The former would make the browser run all scripts and the latter would prevent the page from being processed at all (though this approach might be vulnerable to side-channel attacks if the website is embeddable in an <iframe>).

Block pages from loading when they detect reflected XSS attacks:

X-XSS-Protection: 1; mode=block

PHP

header("X-XSS-Protection: 1; mode=block");

Apache (.htaccess)

<IfModule mod_headers.c>
  Header set X-XSS-Protection "1; mode=block"
</IfModule>

Nginx

add_header "X-XSS-Protection" "1; mode=block";

Not part of any specifications or drafts.

• Content-Security-Policy
• Controlling the XSS Filter – Microsoft
• Understanding XSS Auditor – Virtue Security
• The misunderstood X-XSS-Protection – blog.innerht.ml