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Node Safe Browse -- Utility module to check URLs against Google's SafeBrowsing Lookup API

The SafeBrowsing Lookup API v3 allows applications to check malicious URLs against Google's constantly updated list of malware and phishing websites/pages.

Install

Using npm

  npm install safe-browse

or from source

  git clone git://github.com/arnabc/node-safe-browse.git
  cd node-safe-browse
  npm link

Usage

In order to use the module you need to sign up for an API_KEY at the Google Developers Console.

// initialize
SafeBrowse = require('safe-browse');
var api = new SafeBrowse.Api( API_KEY, options /* optional */ );

By default the lookup() method returns an EventEmitter object which you can use to bind to success and error events respectively.

api.lookup('http://twitter.com')
    .on( 'success', function ( data ) {
	    // handle success
    } )
    .on( 'error', function ( error ) {
	    // handle error
    } );

or you can also use a callback function as the second argument like this:

api.lookup(['http://twitter.com', 'http://gumblar.cn'], function ( error, data ) {
	// handle data
} );

SafeBrowse Options

  • appver - Optional, the version number of the application, default is the version number of the safe-browse module.
  • pver - Google SafeBrowsing API protocol version, you can change this if Google updates their protocol version number. The current version is 3.1 (but there is also a completely re-designed v4).
  • debug - Debug flag (Boolean), enabling this will output some helppful logging messages in Console.
  • api - The URL of the Google SafeBrowsing API, in case it changes you can use the new API url to initialize the module without changing anything in the module code.

Response Handling

In case of success the result data contains a map with the specified URL as the key and corresponding result text as the value (as received from the API).

api.lookup('http://google.com')

// will have the output like below:
{
	statusCode: 204,
	data: {
		'http://google.com': 'ok' // it could be anything like ok|malware|phishing|phishing,malware
	}
}

For multiple requests

To check multiple requests at once, provide an array of valid URLs to the lookup() method.

api.lookup(['http://google.com', 'http://gumblar.cn'])

// will have the output like below:
{
	statusCode: 200,
	data: {
		'http://google.com': 'ok',
		'http://gumblar.cn': 'malware'
	}
}

Response Status Codes

The following are the HTTP status codes that Google SafeBrowsing Lookup API returns for GET or POST request:

GET Requests

  • 200 - The queried URL is either phishing, malware or both, see the response body for the specific type.
  • 204 - The requested URL is legitimate, no response body returned.
  • 400 - Bad Request — The HTTP request was not correctly formed.
  • 401 - Not Authorized — The apikey is not authorized.
  • 503 - Service Unavailable — The server cannot handle the request. Besides the normal server failures, it could also indicate that the client has been throttled by sending too many requests.

Possible reasons for the Bad Request (HTTP code 400):

  • Not all the required CGI parameters are specified
  • Some of the CGI parameters are empty
  • The queried URL is not a valid URL or not properly encoded

Be sure to check against 503, if you get that back off for sometime (the documentation does not specify whether to exponentially back-off or not) and retry again.

POST Requests

If you provide multiple URLs to check against the SafeBrowsing API, safe-browse module automatically uses HTTP POST. The maximum number of URLs that you can check at once is 500.

  • 200 - AT LEAST ONE of the queried URLs are matched in either the phishing or malware lists, the actual results are returned through the response body.
  • 204 - NONE of the queried URLs matched the phishing or malware lists, no response body returned.
  • 400 - Bad Request — The HTTP request was not correctly formed.
  • 401 - Not Authorized — The apikey is not authorized.
  • 503 - Service Unavailable — The server cannot handle the request. Besides the normal server failures, it could also indicate that the client has been throttled by sending too many requests.

Possible reasons for the Bad Request (HTTP code 400):

  • Not all the required CGI parameters are specified.
  • Some of the CGI parameters are empty.
  • Fail to specify the number of URLs in the first line of request body.
  • The number of URLs specified in the first line does not match the actual number of URLs specified in the subsequent lines.
  • At least one of the queried URL is not a valid URL or not properly encoded.

Error Handling

If the response status of the request is one of 400, 401 and 503 then the module fires the error event and the error object contains the statusCode property with the value of the received HTTP status code. Take a look at the following example:

api = new SafeBrowse.API( 'INVALID_API_KEY' );
api.lookup('htp://www.example.com')
	.on( 'error', function ( error ) {
		// the HTTP status text returned by the API
		console.log( error.message );
		// the HTTP status code returned by the API
		console.log( error.statusCode ); // 401 - Not authorized
	} );

About

If you have a question then please file an issue or find me on the Twitter @arnabc.

License

MIT License. Copyright 2012 Arnab Chakraborty. http://arnab.ch