Scenario

Some unscrupulous websites may steal links from other sites to expand their content and reduce costs. This behavior damages the benefits of other sites and increases the burden on servers. The hotlinking protection technology is designed to address this issue.

In the HTTP protocol, websites use the "Referer" header field to identify the source webpages accessing specific webpages. By tracing the source webpages, websites can employ technological measures to block sources that are not originating from the websites themselves. Hotlinking protection uses the "Referer" configuration to determine whether the "Referer" field from source requests matches the trustlist or blocklist. If it matches the trustlist, the access is allowed. Otherwise, the access is denied.

To prevent unauthorized access to ZOS for data theft, ZOS offers a hotlinking protection feature that relies on the "Referer" field in HTTP request headers. In addition, ZOS supports trustlist configuration to control access. You can configure a trustlist to permit requests only from specific sources. This means that even if hotlinkers obtain the URLs, they cannot pass the trustlist verification and are not be able to access the data.

Referer Configuration Rules

• The Referer for a trustlist cannot exceed 1024 characters.

• You can configure multiple Referers and enter them on separate lines.

• The Referer field in an HTTP header specifies the URL initiating requests. This parameter can include wildcard characters (*) and question marks (?). A wildcard character can replace zero or multiple characters, while a question mark replaces a single character.

• When downloading a file, if the Referer field in the request header contains "http" or "https", the Referer configuration must also include "http" or "https".

Usage

Usage	Reference Documentation
Console	For more information, seeHotlink Protection.
SDK	ZOS supports various SDKs. For more information about code examples, seeDeveloper Documentation.

Zettabyte Object Storage

Anti-theft Chain