Automatic and precise client-side protection against CSRF attacks

Abstract

A common client-side countermeasure against Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF) is to strip session and authentication information from malicious requests. The difficulty however is in determining when a request is malicious. Existing client-side countermeasures are typically too strict, thus breaking many existing websites that rely on authenticated cross-origin requests, such as sites that use third-party payment or single sign-on solutions. The contribution of this paper is the design, implementation and evaluation of a request filtering algorithm that automatically and precisely identifies expected cross-origin requests, based on whether they are preceded by certain indicators of collaboration between sites. We formally show through bounded-scope model checking that our algorithm protects against CSRF attacks under one specific assumption about the way in which good sites collaborate cross-origin. We provide experimental evidence that this assumption is realistic: in a data set of 4.7 million HTTP requests involving over 20.000 origins, we only found 10 origins that violate the assumption. Hence, the remaining attack surface for CSRF attacks is very small. In addition, we show that our filtering does not break typical non-malicious cross-origin collaboration scenarios such as payment and single sign-on. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.