Cross-Site Request Forgery: Attack and Defense

Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF) has emerged as a potent threat to Web 2.0 applications. Because of the stateless nature of the HTTP protocol, a malicious Website can force the user´s browser to send unauthorized requests to a trusted site. This demo provides hands on exposure of the various ways in which some popular Web applications are exploited using CSRF, in addition to demonstrating techniques by which CSRF signatures can be detected and attacks effectively resisted even before initiation. The user needs only to install a simple extension to get notified about potential CSRF vulnerabilities. Because validating the Referer Header is a common CSRF prevention method, a novel solution to the Referer Privacy issue will also be demonstrated.