Mozilla launched a free website for security scanning service

In order to help webmasters better protect their websites and users, Mozilla has built an online scanner that can check if web servers have the best security settings in place.

Dubbed Observatory, the tool was initially built for in-house use by Mozilla security engineer April King, who was then encouraged to expand it and make it available outside the company.

She took inspiration from the SSL Server Test from Qualys' SSL Labs, a widely appreciated scanner that rates a website's SSL/TLS configuration and highlights potential weaknesses. Like Qualys' scanner, Observatory uses a scoring system from 0 to 100 -- with the possibility of extra bonus points -- which translates into grades from F to A+.

Unlike the SSL Server Test, which checks only a website's TLS implementation, Mozilla's Observatory scans for a wide range of web security mechanisms. Those include cookie security flags, Cross-Origin Resource Sharing, Content Security Policy, HTTP Public Key Pinning, HTTP Strict Transport Security, redirections, subresource integrity, X-Frame-Options, X-Content-Type-Options, X-XSS-Protection, and more.

The tool doesn't only check for the presence of these technologies, but also whether they're implemented correctly. What the tool doesn't do is scan for vulnerabilities in the actual website code, something that already exists in a large number of free and commercial tools.

In some respects, achieving a secure website configuration -- using all the available technologies developed in recent years by browser makers -- is even harder than finding and patching code vulnerabilities.

"These technologies are spread over dozens of standard documents, and while individual articles may talk about them, there wasn’t one place to go for site operators to learn what each of the technologies do, how to implement them and how important they were," King said in a blog post. Read More