Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) is a type of attack that tricks the victim into submitting a malicious request. It uses the identity and privileges of the victim to perform an undesired action on their behalf. CSRF is an attack that tricks the victim into submitting a malicious request. It’s executed by deriving the authentication credentials of the user and then exploiting it.
Django, a high-level Python Web framework that encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design, has built-in protection against most types of CSRF attacks. Django uses CSRF protection via a middleware mechanism which is included in the ‘MIDDLEWARE’ setting by default. In Django, any HTML form/socket that uses POST data for any form of request is protected by CSRF tokens. This token is a randomly generated unique value that is associated with the current session. This prevents attackers from submitting a form using AJAX/HTTP POST requests from a malicious website.
The key concept behind CSRF protection in Django is to include a CSRF token in a hidden form field or within AJAX request headers and to ensure that each and every POST request includes this token. This way, even if an attacker can trick a user into clicking a link, they cannot replicate the CSRF token, and hence cannot forge a POST request. Once the server receives this token, it checks for its validity to ensure that the user hasn’t been subjected to a CSRF attack.
For example, in a HTML form, you can simply include the CSRF token as shown below:
{% csrf\_token %}
This will render as:
As always, there’s a tradeoff involved. While implementing CSRF protection can be somewhat tricky, and Django’s CSRF protection introduces more complexity than most Django features, the security benefits it provides are crucial.
In conclusion, Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) is a serious security exploit where a malicious website can perform actions on another website where the user is authenticated. Django, being a secure and robust web framework, provides a built-in mechanism to safeguard your web application against CSRF attacks.
Sources:
1. Django documentation: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/3.2/topics/security/#cross-site-request-forgery-csrf
2. Portswigger Web Security Academy: https://portswigger.net/web-security/csrf
3. OWASP CSRF Prevention Cheat Sheet: https://cheatsheetseries.owasp.org/cheatsheets/Cross-Site_Request_Forgery_Prevention_Cheat\_Sheet.html
