Appium Server Security

The Appium team makes every effort to ensure the security of the Appium server. This is especially important when Appium is run in a multi-tenant environment, or when multiple users are running sessions on the same Appium server. To ensure a safe environment for Appium's purposes, all of the following should be true:

• You're running your own Appium server locally or within a protected internal network
• You're not sharing it with any untrusted parties
• You don't expose Appium's port(s) to the wider internet

But because not all Appium hosts can guarantee such a safe environment, certain insecure Appium features are disabled by default, and require explicit opt-in in order to enable them. Most importantly, this can only be done by the Appium server host, and Appium client sessions are not allowed to change this.

While it is possible for an Appium host to simply enable all insecure features at once, each feature also has a unique name, which can be used for granular control over the server state.

Security Server Args

Enabling or disabling insecure features is done via Appium server launch arguments or configuration file. The former document outlines three relevant arguments for achieving this:

Parameter	Description
--relaxed-security	Turns on all insecure features, except those blocked by --deny-insecure
--allow-insecure	Turns on only specified features, except those blocked by --deny-insecure. Has no effect when used in combination with --relaxed-security
--deny-insecure	Explicitly turns off specified features, overriding --relaxed-security and --allow-insecure

Features passed to --allow-insecure/--deny-insecure must be specified as a comma-separated list, and each feature in the list must additionally include a prefix, indicating the driver to whose sessions the feature should apply. The prefix can be either the driver's automationName, or the wildcard (*) symbol, if the feature should be applied to all drivers. The prefix and feature name are separated using the colon character (:).

For example, first:foo refers to the foo feature for the first driver, whereas *:bar refers to the bar feature for all drivers.

Insecure Features

Almost all insecure features are defined on a per-driver or plugin basis, so make sure to read the documentation for a particular driver/plugin to know which feature names it might use.

Certain insecure features are also defined on the Appium server itself. For a list of these features, as well as the features defined in official plugins, see the Insecure Features CLI Reference doc.

Note

If you are a driver or plugin author and want to implement insecure features of your own, check
out the [Building Drivers documentation](../developing/build-drivers.md#understand-server-assigned-driver-properties-and-security-flags).

Examples

Turn on the foo feature only for the first driver:

appium --allow-insecure=first:foo

Turn on the foo feature for all drivers:

appium --allow-insecure='*:foo'

Turn on the foo feature for all drivers except first:

appium --allow-insecure='*:foo' --deny-insecure=first:foo

Turn on all features except foo for all drivers:

appium --relaxed-security --deny-insecure='*:foo'

Turn on multiple insecure features for specific drivers:

appium --allow-insecure=uiautomator2:adb_shell,xcuitest:get_server_logs