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+---
+title: Hugo's security model
+description: A summary of Hugo's security model.
+layout: single
+keywords: ["Security", "Privacy"]
+menu:
+  docs:
+    parent: about
+    weight: 50
+weight: 50
+aliases: [/security/]
+toc: true
+---
+
+## Runtime security
+
+Hugo produces static output, so once built, the runtime is the browser (assuming the output is HTML) and any server (API) that you integrate with.
+
+But when developing and building your site, the runtime is the `hugo` executable. Securing a runtime can be [a real challenge](https://blog.logrocket.com/how-to-protect-your-node-js-applications-from-malicious-dependencies-5f2e60ea08f9/).
+
+**Hugo's main approach is that of sandboxing and a security policy with strict defaults:**
+
+* Hugo has a virtual file system and only the main project (not third-party components) is allowed to mount directories or files outside the project root.
+* Only the main project can walk symbolic links.
+* User-defined components have read-only access to the filesystem.
+* We shell out to some external binaries to support [Asciidoctor](/content-management/formats/#list-of-content-formats) and similar, but those binaries and their flags are predefined and disabled by default (see [Security Policy](#security-policy)). General functions to run arbitrary external OS commands have been [discussed](https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo/issues/796), but not implemented because of security concerns.
+
+## Security policy
+
+Hugo has a built-in security policy that restricts access to [os/exec](https://pkg.go.dev/os/exec), remote communication and similar.
+
+The default configuration is listed below. Any build using features not in the allow list of the security policy will fail with a detailed message about what needs to be done. Most of these settings are allow lists (string or slice, [Regular Expressions](https://pkg.go.dev/regexp) or `none` which matches nothing).
+
+{{< code-toggle config="security" />}}
+
+Note that these and other configuration settings in Hugo can be overridden by the OS environment. If you want to block all remote HTTP fetching of data:
+
+```txt
+HUGO_SECURITY_HTTP_URLS=none hugo
+```
+
+## Dependency security
+
+Hugo is built as a static binary using [Go Modules](https://github.com/golang/go/wiki/Modules) to manage its dependencies. Go Modules have several safeguards, one of them being the `go.sum` file. This is a database of the expected cryptographic checksums of all of your dependencies, including transitive dependencies.
+
+[Hugo Modules](/hugo-modules/) is a feature built on top of the functionality of Go Modules. Like Go Modules, a Hugo project using Hugo Modules will have a `go.sum` file. We recommend that you commit this file to your version control system. The Hugo build will fail if there is a checksum mismatch, which would be an indication of [dependency tampering](https://julienrenaux.fr/2019/12/20/github-actions-security-risk/).
+
+## Web application security
+
+These are the security threats as defined by [OWASP](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OWASP).
+
+For HTML output, this is the core security model:
+
+<https://pkg.go.dev/html/template#hdr-Security_Model>
+
+In short:
+
+Template and configuration authors (you) are trusted, but the data you send in is not.
+This is why you sometimes need to use the _safe_ functions, such as `safeHTML`, to avoid escaping of data you know is safe.
+There is one exception to the above, as noted in the documentation: If you enable inline shortcodes, you also say that the shortcodes and data handling in content files are trusted, as those macros are treated as pure text.
+It may be worth adding that Hugo is a static site generator with no concept of dynamic user input.
+
+For content, the default Markdown renderer is [configured](/getting-started/configuration-markup) to remove or escape potentially unsafe content. This behavior can be reconfigured if you trust your content.