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Comment by vectorpush | Hacker News Reader

it took me a long time to understand the point behind CSR (cross-site requests) and CRSF fully enough to find them EXTREMELY malicious.

I think this is a very important line. The sense I get around most of my colleagues is that CSRF exploits are only something "bad programmers" get wrong. Of course, they're all rockstars who've never been exploited (yet/AFATK) so it's not like they need to spend a weekend or five paging through droll security papers. A little modesty would do us all well.

90% of developers just don't care and don't spend time on that.

Indeed. It takes time to learn, time to code, and unless you're working at a big shop, there's little pressure (or even acknowledgement of the need) to get this stuff right.

Keep up the good work OP.

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CSRF is like a kafka-esque joke.

Here's my take away from every CSRF article:

A malicious site will load your site in an iframe, fill in your form and post it. Fixing it requires some a token in your form, but I can see you don't understand how an extra hidden field in your form will make a difference so you're clearly not going to handle it correctly. You're screwed. Go home.

As far as I can tell, CSRF should have existed since javascript & frames. How have the browser vendors not fixed such a huge insecure-by-design flaw?

The difficulty is how to deny this happening.

Pages making GET requests across domains is so common and necessary that several technology standards would have to come together to propose a real fix. Every image or script loaded from a CDN. Anyone hosting their own static assets domains. Anyone using a plugin from Google, Facebook, Twitter, Disqus uses this ability.

The tech companies can't even easily create a system to whitelist sites allowed to embed them, because that would severely limit third party's ability to use their services freely and would introduce a huge performance bottleneck.

I haven't seen any particularly compelling solution to solving this. Things only guarded behind a GET request can be loaded by script, link, embed, object, img and iframe tags, and all of those have legitimate reasons for loading resources cross domain without requesting permissions for each one from the user.

I have no problem with cross-site GET requests because I know GETs should behave as 'read-only' anyway for lots of reasons.

What I don't get is how arbitrary cross-site POSTs with malicious values are allowed. As far as I can tell, anyone can post this form:

Worse, one article will tell you to only allow Referrer == "bank.com", and then another will tell you that even that is no longer enough?!!!

Why can't we change the browser or the web server layer to prevent this by default?!

Browsers don't prevent it because there are legitimate uses for cross-domain posts. Good frameworks do prevent it with CSRF tokens.

I don't want the legitimate uses prevented. The default behavior should be to prevent, and the legitimate uses should explicitly opt-in. That way, you only have to do security analysis for those explicit points.

But there's existing code that would break.

This to me is a server side issue- but that doesn't necessarily mean it's on the app developer. The behavior you're talking about can be set most servers directly, by adding the "X-Frame-Options" header into every request by default. Then exceptions would have to be made explicitly, by either the server admin or application developer. If anyone should change the default behavior (which I am not convinced is the case) it should be the server developers, not the browsers.

X-Frame-Options only prevents the page from being displayed in a frame. It doesn't prevent a page on another domain from submitting a POST request.

CSRF is solved very simply by using tokens for each field. If the attacking site can't load the other page, it can't pull the token out, and without the token the post gets discarded. If you've abstracted your form generation this should be super simple to add.

Thank you for pointing me to X-Frame-Origin!

So, in the context of this discussion, why don't the browsers make X-Frame-Origin: DENY the default behavior?????

Can you give some examples of legitemate post requests that need to work cross-domain.

It's not that the referer header is not "enough". "Enough" implies that it falls somewhere on the scale of trustworthiness.

It's user input. Don't trust user input.

Why shouldn't you trust user-provided data to secure the same user's data? The potential attack is someone forging their own referer header in order to attack themself.

The referer header can easily be forged. The whole point of a CSRF attack is to turn a user's credentials against him.

How do you forge the referer header as a third-party site?

Ha, I'm wrong. I thought you could set the referer with setRequestHeader on an XHR. Mea maxima culpa.

A malicious site will load your site in an iframe, fill in your form and post it.

I browser cannot do this. The OP probably saw some exploit code in an ad which was served in an IFrame, but the same-domain security model will not allow you to interact with another window or IFrame that is of a different domain.

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