Building a Robust Client-Side Protection Against Cross Site Request Forgery

Abstract

In recent years, the web has been an indispensable part of business all over the world and web browsers have become the backbones of today's systems and applications. Unfortunately, the number of web application attacks has increased a great deal, so the matter of concern is securing web applications. One of the most serious cyber-attacks has been by cross site request forgery (CSRF). CSRF has been recognized among the major threats to web applications and among the top ten worst vulnerabilities for web applications. In a CSRF attack, an attacker takes liberty be authorized to take a sensitive action on a target website on behalf of a user without his knowledge. This paper, providing an overview about CSRF attack, describes the various possible attacks, the developed solutions, and the risks in the current preventive techniques. This paper comes up with a highly perfect protection mechanism against reflected CSRF called RCSR. RCSR is a tool gives computer users with full control on the attack. RCSR tool relies on specifying HTTP request source, whether it comes from different tab or from the same one of a valid user, it observes and intercepts every request that is passed through the user’s browser and extracts session information, post the extracted information to the Server, then the server create a token for user's session. We checked the working of RCSR extension, our evaluation results show that it is working well and it successfully protects web applications against reflected CSRF.