HSTS Beyond the Basics: Securing AI Infrastructure and Modern Attack Vectors

It all started while I was working with a colleague on web security. I heard that their team is enabling HSTS as part of their Black Friday security upgrades to their website. The first question that popped into my mind is, why do you require HSTS if there is HTTP/2 and HTTP/3? You can read my article on Hackernoon to understand the basics of HSTS.

For starters, HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) is a web security policy mechanism that helps protect websites against protocol downgrade attacks and cookie hijacking. Introduced in 2012 as RFC 6797, HSTS has become a critical component of modern web security infrastructure, ensuring that browsers communicate with web servers exclusively over secure HTTPS connections. But as AI systems grow and move to production in enterprises, HSTS would become critical for protecting machine learning pipelines, API endpoints, and model deployments. Let’s explore advanced use cases and how HSTS principles apply to AI security.