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Comment by divtxt | Hacker News Reader

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?!

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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.

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