Hi guys,

Recently I was working with Django's CSRF protection, customizing it to my 
needs, and discussing with co-workers exactly how it works and how it has 
protection against the BREACH attack being used to retrieve the CSRF key.

Relevant code 
here: https://github.com/django/django/blob/master/django/middleware/csrf.py#L45

One point of confusion is the use of the term salt in Django's source code. 
People expect salt to mean the same as salt in the database, that works 
quite differently and doesn't mask the actual secret.

I'm not a security expert so I may be wrong, but I think that "One-time 
pad", "XOR mask" or just "mask" would be more accurate terms.

I propose to change the "salt" to "mask" everywhere these terms appear in 
the CSRF code, and similarly "unsalt" to "unmask". As far as I know this 
wouldn't affect functionality at all, because the term "salt" doesn't 
appear in actual tokens.

What do you think? 


Ram.

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