Network Error Logging (NEL) enables web applications to declare a reporting policy that can be used by the browser to report network errors for a given origin. DNS resolution errors, secure connection errors, HTTP errors like 404s, redirect loops etc. But you can even get HTTP 2xx, 3xx success reports, if you wish.
NEL response header:NEL: {"report_to":"default","max_age":1800,"include_subdomains":true}report_to: name of the group where to send NEL reports to (that's an underscore, unlike in the Content-Security-Policy header)max_age: the lifetime of this NEL policy in seconds, set to weeks or months eventually to also get reports from browsers that have not visited the site for some timeinclude_subdomains: optional, whether this policy applies to all subdomains of the current domain
include_subdomains: true NEL policy cached for https://example.com, it will not generate reports for expired certificate on https://expired.example.com because these errors happen in the connection phasehttps://example.comThe header can also contain these optional fields, both are a number between 0.0 and 1.0:
success_fraction: defines a sampling rate to limit the number of "successful" reports sent by the browser, by default no such reports are sentfailure_fraction: defines a sampling rate to limit the number of "failure" reports sent by the browser, all such reports are sent by defaultReport-To response header:Report-To: {"group":"default","max_age":1800,"endpoints":[{"url":"https://scour.has.report/report.php"}],"include_subdomains":true}group: the name of the group, the same as in the NEL headermax_age: how long the browser should use the endpoint and report errors to itendpoints: reporting endpoint configuration, can specify multiple endpoints but reports will be sent to just one of them
url: where to send reports to, must be https://, otherwise the endpoint will be ignoredhttps://canhas.report/ohmic-snout-is.404
<code id="url">https://canhas.report/ohmic-snout-is.404</code>
<script>
document.getElementById('http').onclick = function() {
new Image().src = document.getElementById('url').textContent;
alert('HTTP 404 generated');
}
</script>
https://cheezburger.canhas.report
<code id="cheezburger">https://cheezburger.canhas.report</code>
<script>
document.getElementById('dns').onclick = function() {
new Image().src = document.getElementById('cheezburger').textContent;
alert('DNS resolution error generated');
}
</script>
One of the most useful NEL report types could be TLS error reports. Things like expired certificate sometimes happen even if you automate renewal and NEL offers an easy way to monitor for such issues.
Now, testing TLS NEL reports is not exactly easy and cannot be done with just a few clicks here.
The reason is that the browser needs to cache the NEL policy for the host first, and for that it needs a working and secure HTTPS connection (i.e. no errors).
And then the same browser needs to encounter an error when loading a page using HTTPS from the same host, not even from the host's subdomain
– that's because include_subdomains: true doesn't apply for the connection phase of the request for privacy reasons,
and the connection phase is exactly where secure connection establishment errors occur. But you can…
Fiddler is a great HTTP debugging proxy originally written by Eric Lawrence and you can use it to inspect HTTP and HTTPS traffic (and much more). We'll use it to generate a TLS error in your browser. Although it would be possible to simulate an expired certificate with Fiddler, let's take the slightly easier path and simulate a certificate issued by an untrusted certification authority:
"type": "tls.cert.authority_invalid", "phase": "connection" and if this would be a report for an expired certificate, you'd see tls.cert.date_invalid typeSee also Chrome's list of all NEL types.
Reporting-Endpoints instead of Report-To) and moving out concrete reports into the following separate Draft Community Group Reports:
Crash Reporting,
Deprecation Reporting,
Intervention Reporting