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Will this cause any harm? Does it serve any purpose other than tell browsers you have .net installed?

I like this article about changing the header to Pure Evil. Genius!


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Maybe this belongs on Server Fault? –  Josh Lee Jul 30 '10 at 19:49
Maybe, but there isn't much activity over there! It COULD be programming related if it impacts anything downstream... –  ScottE Jul 30 '10 at 19:50
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up vote 9 down vote accepted

This header (and a few other headers) is not required or used by modern browsers and can safely be removed from the web site configuration in IIS without consequence. Other server-side languages also tend to include a "Powered by..." header that can be safely removed. Here is another article that claims the same thing:



The Server, X-Powered-By, X-AspNet-Version, and X-AspNetMvc-Version HTTP headers provide no direct benefit and unnecessarily chew up a small amount of bandwidth. Fortunately, these response headers can be removed with some configuration changes.

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Yes you can remove it,it will not affect anything. All x-headers are custom/non standard and informational only by definition. Browsers ignore them. The only thing it could affect is some kind of custom application that actually uses them for something e.g. a web crawler that gathers statistics on what technology is being used on what website might use the header to determine if a site uses asp.net. They don't actually do anything.

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Anything to support this, or is this from personal experience? –  ScottE Jul 30 '10 at 19:51
I have updated my answer with a but more info. –  Ben Robinson Jul 30 '10 at 20:04
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Yes you can remove it and it will give away less information to automated hacking tools and here you have a tutorial how to get a rid of Server, X-AspNet-Version, X-AspNetMvc-Version (if you use ASP.NET MVC) and X-Powered-By


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Add this to your web.config section

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Here's another post on serverfault that says the same thing with some justification as to a why to remove it.

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