CSRF Guard

Overview
Just when developers are starting to run in circles over Cross Site Scripting (XSS), the 'sleeping giant' awakes for yet another web-catastrophe. Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) is an attack whereby the victim is tricked into loading information from or submitting information to a web application for which they are currently authenticated. The problem is that the web application has no means of verifying the integrity of the request.

How does the attack work?
There are numerous ways in which an end-user can be tricked into loading information from or submitting information to a web application. In order to execute an attack, we must first understand how to generate a malicious request for our victim to execute. Let us consider the following example: Alice wishes to transfer $100 to Bob using bank.com. The request generated by Alice will look similar to the following:

POST http://bank.com/transfer.do HTTP/1.1 ... ... ... Content-Length: 19; acct=BOB&amount=100

However, Maria notices that the same web application will execute the same transfer using URL parameters as follows:

GET http://bank.com/transfer.do?acct=BOB&amount=100 HTTP/1.1

Maria now decides to exploit this web application vulnerability using Alice as her victim. Maria first constructs the following URL which will transfer $100,000 from Alice's account to her account:

http://bank.com/transfer.do?acct=MARIA&amount=100000

Now that her malicious request is generated, Maria must trick Alice into submitting the request. The most basic method is to send Alice an HTML email containing the following:

View my Pictures!

Assuming Alice is authenticated with the application when she clicks the link, the transfer of $100,000 to Maria's account will occur. However, Maria realizes that if Alice clicks the link, then Alice will notice that a transfer has occurred. Therefore, Maria decides to hide the attack in a zero-byte image:



If this image tag were included in the email, Alice would only see a little box indicating that the browser could not render the image. However, the browser will still submit the request to bank.com without any visual indication that the transfer has taken place.

Prevention measures that do NOT work

 * Using a secret cookie
 * Remember that all cookies, even the secret ones, will be submitted with every request. All authentication tokens will be submitted regardless of whether or not the end-user was tricked into submitting the request. Furthermore, session identifiers are simply used by the application container to associate the request with a specific session object. The session identifier does not verify that the end-user intended to submit the request.


 * Only accepting POST requests
 * Applications can be developed to only accept POST requests for the execution of business logic. The misconception is that since the attacker cannot construct a malicious link, a CSRF attack cannot be executed. Unfortunately, this logic is incorrect. There are numerous methods in which an attacker can trick a victim into submitting a forged POST request. The two most common methods are through the use of phishing sites (sites which appear to look like another valid site) and through the use of XMLHTTPRequest in a Cross-Site Scripting attack.

Recommended Prevention Measure: Unique Request Tokens
The core issue with CSRF attacks is that form submission can be imitated with forged requests. The application must be able to differentiate between legal requests and forged requests. Since all headers, cookies, and credentials will be submitted with both legal and forged requests, the only method of truly verifying the integrity of the request is with a uniquely identifiable token in the form of an HTTP parameter. When the user first visits the site, the application will generate and store a session specific unique request token. This session specific unique request token is then placed in each form and link of the HTML response, ensuring that this value will be submitted with the next request. For each subsequent request, the application must verify the existence of the unique token parameter and compare its value to that of the value stored in the user's session. The security of the approach is based on the fact that this unique token value is specific to a user's session and is hard to guess. Therefore, it is imperative that this value is large and cryptographically secure.


 * UPDATE: There have been discussions suggesting that the unique request token can be compromised using JavaScript. This attack implies that the application contains a Cross-Site scripting attack, which is a more severe issue than Cross-Site request forgery.

J2EE Filter
J2EE filters provide the ability to intercept, view, and modify both the request and associated response for the requesting client. Filters are inserted and executed by the J2EE container's deployment descriptor (web.xml) file. For example, if an HTTP request for a JSP page hits our Apache web server, the request is sent to Tomcat for processing. Before Tomcat executes the code inside of the JSP, the request must be passed along a chain of J2EE filters. The following snippet illustrates how to declare and map a filter to a particular URI-space in web.xml:

CSRFGuard org.owasp.csrf.CSRFGuard  error-page error.jsp   CSRFGuard <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern> </filter-mapping>

Implementing the CSRF Guard as a J2EE Filter gives us the ability to verify the integrity of the request before it ever hits our web application.

Secure Random
When implementing the CSRF Guard, we must ensure that the unique request token is cryptographically strong. After all, our implementation relies on the principle that the unique token is difficult to guess. If the unique request token can be easily guessed then a CSRF attack can be executed.

The following code snippet generates a BASE64 encoded string of 'size' bytes:

private String generateCSRFToken(int size) { SecureRandom sr = null; byte[] random = new byte[size]; BASE64Encoder encoder = new BASE64Encoder; String digest = null; try { sr = SecureRandom.getInstance("SHA1PRNG"); sr.nextBytes(random); digest = encoder.encode(random); } catch (Exception e) { e.printStackTrace; }       return digest; }

Implementation
The following J2EE Filter will attempt to verify the integrity of the request by comparing the OWASP_CSRFTOKEN HTTP parameter value with that of the OWASP_CSRFTOKEN session attribute. If the two values do not match, then the request is forged and we invoked the doError method. This method will invalidate the existing session and redirect the user to a page specified by the filter init-parameter "error-page". If the parameter value equals the corresponding session attribute value, then we call doChain and pass the request to the web application. Once the web application is finished processing the request, the buildLinkParameters method will search the HTML response for forms and links and insert the appropriate OWASP_CSRFTOKEN parameter value. Unfortunately, the dependency on an HTML response means that the current filter may not work with some Web 2.0 applications. Furthermore, the filter only modifies response objects whose "Content-Type" header is text based. If your web application neglects to set the appropriate value for the "Content-Type" header, then the CSRF Guard will not make the appropriate changes to the HTML response and each subsequent request will be considered a violation.

/* * CSRFGuard.java * * Created on January 2, 2007, 11:35 AM  * * Copyright (C) 2007 Eric Sheridan * * This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or * modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public * License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either * version 2.1 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. * * This library is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, * but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of * MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU * Lesser General Public License for more details. * * You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public * License along with this library; if not, write to the Free Software * Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301  USA */ package org.owasp.csrf; import java.io.OutputStream; import java.io.IOException; import java.security.SecureRandom; import java.util.regex.Pattern; import javax.servlet.Filter; import javax.servlet.FilterChain; import javax.servlet.FilterConfig; import javax.servlet.ServletException; import javax.servlet.ServletRequest; import javax.servlet.ServletResponse; import javax.servlet.http.HttpSession; import javax.servlet.http.HttpServletRequest; import javax.servlet.http.HttpServletResponse; import sun.misc.BASE64Encoder; import org.owasp.csrf.http.MutableHttpResponse; /** *  * @author esheridan */ public class CSRFGuard implements Filter { public final static String OWASP_CSRFTOKEN = "OWASP_CSRFTOKEN"; public final static Pattern FORM_PATTERN = Pattern.compile("(?i) "); public final static Pattern SKIPPABLE_PATTERN = Pattern.compile(".*\\.(gif|jpg|png|css|js|ico|swf|axd.*)$"); private String errorPage = null; public void init(FilterConfig config) { errorPage = config.getInitParameter("error-page"); }   public void doFilter(ServletRequest request, ServletResponse response, FilterChain chain) { if(request instanceof HttpServletRequest && response instanceof HttpServletResponse) { try { HttpServletRequest hRequest = (HttpServletRequest)request; MutableHttpResponse mResponse = new MutableHttpResponse((HttpServletResponse)response); HttpSession session = hRequest.getSession(false); if(session != null) { if(!hasCSRFToken(session)) { setCSRFToken(session); doChain(hRequest, mResponse, response, chain); } else if(isSkippable(hRequest) || isValidRequest(session, hRequest)) { doChain(hRequest, mResponse, response, chain); } else { doError(session, (HttpServletResponse)response); }               } else { chain.doFilter(request, response); }           } catch (Exception e) { e.printStackTrace; }       }    }    public void destroy { }   private void doError(HttpSession session, HttpServletResponse response) throws IOException { session.invalidate; response.sendRedirect(errorPage); }   private void doChain(HttpServletRequest request, MutableHttpResponse mResponse, ServletResponse response, FilterChain chain) throws IOException, ServletException { OutputStream out = response.getOutputStream; chain.doFilter(request, mResponse); String contentType = mResponse.getContentType; String token = getCSRFToken(request.getSession); if(contentType != null && contentType.startsWith("text")) { String content = new String(mResponse.getContent); content = getModifiedResponse(token, content); byte[] result = content.getBytes; response.setContentLength(result.length); out.write(result); } else { out.write(mResponse.getContent); }       out.close; }   private String getModifiedResponse(String token, String content) { content = buildFormParameters(content, token); content = buildLinkParameters(content, token); return content; }   private String getCSRFToken(HttpSession session) { return (String)session.getAttribute(OWASP_CSRFTOKEN); }   private boolean hasCSRFToken(HttpSession session) { return getCSRFToken(session) != null; }   private void setCSRFToken(HttpSession session) { session.setAttribute(OWASP_CSRFTOKEN, generateCSRFToken); }   private String generateCSRFToken { return generateCSRFToken(32); }   private String generateCSRFToken(int size) { SecureRandom sr = null; byte[] random = new byte[size]; BASE64Encoder encoder = new BASE64Encoder; String digest = null; try { sr = SecureRandom.getInstance("SHA1PRNG"); sr.nextBytes(random); digest = encoder.encode(random); } catch (Exception e) { e.printStackTrace; }       return digest; }   private boolean isSkippable(HttpServletRequest request) { return SKIPPABLE_PATTERN.matcher(request.getRequestURI).matches; }   private boolean isValidRequest(HttpSession session, HttpServletRequest request) { String original = (String)session.getAttribute(OWASP_CSRFTOKEN); String now = (String)request.getParameter(OWASP_CSRFTOKEN); boolean result = false; if(now != null && now.equals(original)) { result = true; }       return result; }   private String buildFormParameters(String content, String token) { return FORM_PATTERN.matcher(content).replaceAll("<input type=\"hidden\" name=\"" + OWASP_CSRFTOKEN + "\" value=\"" + token + "\">\n "); }   private String buildLinkParameters(String content, String token) { content = buildLinkParameters(content, token, "href=\"", '"'); content = buildLinkParameters(content, token, "src=\"", '"'); return content; }   private String buildLinkParameters(String content, String token, String pattern, char termChar) { StringBuffer buffer = new StringBuffer; int i=0; int index = 0; int length = content.length; while(i < length) { index = content.toLowerCase.indexOf(pattern, i); if(index != -1) { int offset = 0; int n = 0; boolean parameters = false; String tokenString = null; buffer.append(content.substring(i, index+pattern.length)); for(n=index+pattern.length, offset=n; n<=length && content.charAt(n) != termChar; n++) { buffer.append(content.charAt(n)); if(content.charAt(n) == '?') { parameters = true; }               }                if(parameters) { tokenString = "&" + OWASP_CSRFTOKEN + "=" + token; } else { tokenString = "?" + OWASP_CSRFTOKEN + "=" + token; }               buffer.append(tokenString); i = index + pattern.length + (n - offset); } else { buffer.append(content.substring(i, length)); i = length; }       }        return buffer.toString; } }

Download
The Proof-of-Concept implementation of the Cross-Site Request Forgery Guard discussed in this article can be downloaded