OWASP CSRFGuard

Tool Project

The OWASP CSRFGuard is one of the world’s most popular free security tools and is actively maintained by a pool of international volunteers.

The OWASP CSRFGuard library is integrated through the use of a JavaEE Filter and exposes various automated and manual ways to integrate per-session or pseudo-per-request tokens into HTML. When a user interacts with this HTML, CSRF prevention tokens (i.e. cryptographically random synchronizer tokens) are submitted with the corresponding HTTP request.

It is the responsibility of OWASP CSRFGuard to ensure the token is present and is valid for the current HTTP request.

Any attempt to submit a request to a protected resource without the correct corresponding token is viewed as a CSRF attack in progress and is discarded. Prior to discarding the request, CSRFGuard can be configured to take one or more actions such as logging aspects of the request and redirecting the user to a landing page. The latest release enhances this strategy to support the optional verification of HTTP requests submitted using Ajax as well as the optional verification of referrer headers.

As OWASP project we follow the OWASP Code Of Conduct available here: https://owasp.org/www-policy/operational/code-of-conduct

OWASP CSRFGuard 4.0.0

Some CSRGuard features

Autoposting Forms

<body onload="document.forms[0].submit()">
<form method="POST" action=“https://bank.com/fn”>
   <input type="hidden" name="sp" value="8109"/>
</form>

XmlHttpRequest

Subject to same origin policy

Credentials Included

How Does CSRF Work?

What is CSRF (Cross-Site Request Forgery) Attacks

How Does CSRF Work

CSRFGuard In Action

CSRFGuard in action

Latest News

We are working on a new version of CSRFGuard including a lot of merge request with good proposals and new code to fix known issues on XSS attacks that bypass CSRFGuard.

Target date for the new release 4.0 : 2021

We need your help. If you want to give few hours of your time please reach out to us.

Supporters

CSRFGuard is developed by a worldwide of volunteers in Morocco, France, India, China, Singapore, Indonesia, Canada and more.

Special Thanks

Thanks to Trent Schmidt and Joel Orlina (JIRA) for there help.

Documentations for various Web Application Servers

We need first to create a complete set of installation guide for various Java Application Server.

CSRFGuard 4.0 features

CSRFGuard 4.0 is under development. If you are Java developer and want to help as OWASP volunteer please contact the project leaders. We will remove all CSRFGuard 3.1.0 limitations and release CSRFGuard 4.0

The following roadmap will remove the following CSRFGuard 3.1.0 limitations:

CSRF Guard utilizes the external interface of Tomcat web server; it may not provide adequate protection for other web server applications (e.g. Internet Information Server IIS).
CSRF Guard can provide adequate protection against CSRF attacks; however, it can be compromised by server side vulnerabilities such as cross site scripting or client side vulnerabilities (session hijacking or clickjacking) or unintentional leverage token by unauthorized parties.
CSRF Guard makes the connection between a token and a session id to check the token validity, Because of this dependency on the session identifiers; it cannot defend against login CSRF attacks.
CSRF Guard filters input HTTP requests by token pattern; therefore, it cannot check the input validation error, to effectively protect against CSRF attack, the developer needs to ensure the web application implements countermeasures to defense against cross scripting attacks.
Enhance Token Injection Process
Add protection against Clickjacking
Add protection against Session Hijacking bypassing CSRFGuard
Add protection against XSS by passing CSRFGuard

Watch Star

Project Classification

Flagship Project

Builders Breakers

Tool Project

CSRFGuard 4.0 released in April 2021

https://owasp.org/www-project-csrfguard/

Overview

Welcome to the home of the OWASP CSRFGuard Project! OWASP CSRFGuard is a library that implements a variant of the synchronizer token pattern to mitigate the risk of Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) attacks. The OWASP CSRFGuard library is integrated through the use of a JavaEE Filter and exposes various automated and manual ways to integrate per-session or pseudo-per-request tokens into HTML. When a user interacts with this HTML, CSRF prevention tokens (i.e. cryptographically random synchronizer tokens) are submitted with the corresponding HTTP request. It is the responsibility of OWASP CSRFGuard to ensure the token is present and is valid for the current HTTP request. Any attempt to submit a request to a protected resource without the correct corresponding token is viewed as a CSRF attack in progress and is discarded. Prior to discarding the request, CSRFGuard can be configured to take one or more actions such as logging aspects of the request and redirecting the user to a landing page. The latest release enhances this strategy to support the optional verification of HTTP requests submitted using Ajax as well as the optional verification of referrer headers.

Project Leads

The CSRFGuard project is run by Azzeddine RAMRAMI and Istvan ALBERT-TOTH.

License

OWASP CSRFGuard 4.x is offered under the BSD license.

Using with Maven

Add the following dependencies to your Maven POM file to use the library:
Note: for the Jakarta releases use the -jakarta suffix in the version.

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.owasp</groupId>
    <artifactId>csrfguard</artifactId>
    <version>4.3.0</version>
</dependency>

<!-- Stateful web application support -->
<dependency>
	<groupId>org.owasp</groupId>
	<artifactId>csrfguard-extension-session</artifactId>
	<version>4.3.0</version>
</dependency>

<!-- JSP TAG support -->
<dependency>
	<groupId>org.owasp</groupId>
	<artifactId>csrfguard-jsp-tags</artifactId>
	<version>4.3.0</version>
</dependency>

Building the code

Make sure you have Apache Maven 3.0.4+ and JDK 11+ installed
Clone this repository locally
Build the project by running mvn clean install in the project root directory
Build and run the test JSP web application by running mvn pre-integration-test -Pdeploy-jsp-webapp -pl csrfguard-test/csrfguard-test-jsp or mvn -Pdeploy-jsp-webapp -pl csrfguard-test/csrfguard-test-jsp tomcat7:run
Optional: you can use mvnDebug to enable remote debugging, then connect your IDE to it (default port is 8000)
Use a web browser to access http://localhost:8080 to open the home page of the test project

Uploading to the Maven Central repository

Follow the Sonatype Open-Source Project Maven Repository Usage Guide to create a Sonatype user account;
Next, open a support request to get your newly created username added to the Maven groupId org.owasp;
Once the support request has been completed, follow the instructions in the Sonatype Maven repository usage guide mentioned above to upload new versions to the Maven Central repository.

Maven Central repository

You can download pre-compiled versions from:

Discussions and Email list

If you have questions, would like to share or discuss ideas, please use the official discussions page (preferred). You can also sign up for the OWASP CSRFGuard email list here.