Cross-Site Request Forgery

How does Cross-Site Request Forgery work?

A CSRF attack targets Web applications failing to differentiate between valid requests and forged requests controlled by attacker. There are many ways for an attacker to try and exploit the CSRF vulnerability.

To give you an example, let’s say that Bob has an online banking account on samplebank.com. He regularly visits this site to conduct transactions with his friend Alice. Bob is unaware that samplebank.com is vulnerable to CSRF attacks. Meanwhile, an attacker aims to transfer $5,000 from Bob’s account by exploiting this vulnerability. To successfully launch this attack:

1. The attacker must build an exploit URL.
2. The attacker must also trick Bob into clicking the exploit URL.
3. Bob needs to have an active session with samplebank.com.

Let’s say that the online banking application is built using the GET method to submit a transfer request. As such, Bob’s request to transfer $500 to Alice (with account number 213367) might look like this:

GET https://samplebank.com/onlinebanking/transfer?amount=500&accountNumber=213367 HTTP/1.1

Aligning with the first requirement to successfully launch a CSRF attack, an attacker must craft a malicious URL to transfer $5,000 to the account 425654:

https://samplebank.com/onlinebanking/transfer?amount=5000&accountNumber=425654

Using various social engineering attack methods, an attacker can trick Bob into loading the malicious URL. This can be achieved in various ways. For instance, including malicious HTML image elements onto forms, placing a malicious URL on pages that are often accessed by users while logged into the application, or by sending a malicious URL through email.

The following is an example of a disguised URL:

<img src  = “https://samplebank.com/onlinebanking/transfer?amount=5000&accountNumber=425654” width=“0” height= “0”>

Consider the scenario that includes an image tag in an attacker-crafted email to Bob. Upon receiving it, Bob’s browser application opens this URL automatically—without human intervention. As a result, without Bob’s permission, a malicious request is sent to the online banking application. If Bob has an active session with samplebank.com, the application would treat this as an authorized amount transfer request coming from Bob. It would then transfer the amount to the account specified by an attacker.

There are some limitations. To carry out a successful CSRF attack, consider the following:

• The success of a CSRF attack depends on a user’s session with a vulnerable application. The attack will only be successful if the user is in an active session with the vulnerable application.
• An attacker must find a valid URL to maliciously craft. The URL needs to have a state-changing effect on the target application.
• An attacker also needs to find the right values for the URL parameters. Otherwise, the target application might reject the malicious request.