No, if there are no CSRF/XSRF protections in place, all that is needed is
for the victim to be logged into the target website and visit the attackers
website or a website they control. The 'evil' website can have
javascript/img tags/etc that will cause the victim browser to perform the
needed GET/POST requests to perform the action that the attacker wishes to
have performed.

On Fri, Nov 20, 2009 at 11:31 PM, Soft Reset <[email protected]>wrote:

> Yeah, I see.  So the 'authenticity_token' they have is can still be
> eavesdropped but will prevent, as you say, browser GET/POST requests.  But
> to 'insert' a img tag, hidden iframe etc, doesn't the attacker have to be
> "in the middle" anyway?
>
> On Fri, Nov 20, 2009 at 7:52 PM, Knight, Brandon <[email protected]>wrote:
>
>> CSRF tokens are not used to protect against man-in-the-middle attacks.  If
>> somebody can MITM they can see and do whatever they want to your HTTP
>> requests and/or responses.
>>
>> A CSRF token is designed to protect against a remote attack where somebody
>> forces a victim's browser to GET/POST a request to the site they are
>> targeting.  This can be done by using img tags, hidden iframes, etc to
>> obscure this secondary request form being noticed by the victim.  The CSRF
>> token is available only within the DOM(or in cookies) of the site it is
>> placed on and, given good design and enforcement of the same origin policy,
>> should only be known to the user of the site and the site itself.  The only
>> way, as an attacker, to obtain it would be either through brute force,
>> exploiting poor design such as weakly selected tokens, or potentially
>> through poor trust relationships such as exploiting third party javascript
>> running on the site.
>>
>> Make sense?
>>
>> -Brandon
>>
>> On Nov 20, 2009, at 4:38 PM, Soft Reset wrote:
>>
>> Makes sense if the connection protected the token.  According to
>> Wikipedia,
>>
>>   "Requiring a secret, user-specific token in all form submissions
>> prevents
>>    CSRF; the attacker's site can't put the right token in its 
>> submissions.<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-site_request_forgery#cite_note-Shiflett-0>
>> [1]"
>>
>> But if the form Twitter returns (containing the token) is returned over
>> HTTP (which it is), the token is not secret and does not need to be
>> predicted...just eavesdropped.
>>
>> Does this sound right or am I way off and misunderstanding the whole
>> concept of XSRFs?
>>
>> --sr6
>>
>> On Fri, Nov 20, 2009 at 3:23 PM, Chris Biettchert <
>> [email protected]> wrote:
>>
>>> The authenticity_token is used for for xsrf protection. It works as
>>> intended as long as it can not be predicted for another user.
>>>
>>> On Fri, Nov 20, 2009 at 10:36 AM, Soft Reset 
>>> <[email protected]>wrote:
>>>
>>>> I just noticed it and was wondering if anyone else had.  Twitter has
>>>> their "authenticity_token" as a 'hidden' input on forms...including 
>>>> password
>>>> changes, resets, etc.  Anyone tried hijacking a twitter login to verify 
>>>> this
>>>> is bad form (no pun intended)?  Don't want to re-invent the wheel if 
>>>> someone
>>>> already did it.
>>>>
>>>> If someone has tried it successfully, has it been brought up to the
>>>> twitter folks as a push for full SSL sessions?  (yeah, I know SSL is also
>>>> having issues at the moment, but still...)
>>>>
>>>> --sr6
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> Pauldotcom mailing list
>>>> [email protected]
>>>> http://mail.pauldotcom.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pauldotcom
>>>> Main Web Site: http://pauldotcom.com
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Pauldotcom mailing list
>>> [email protected]
>>> http://mail.pauldotcom.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pauldotcom
>>> Main Web Site: http://pauldotcom.com
>>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Pauldotcom mailing list
>> [email protected]
>> http://mail.pauldotcom.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pauldotcom
>> Main Web Site: http://pauldotcom.com
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Pauldotcom mailing list
>> [email protected]
>> http://mail.pauldotcom.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pauldotcom
>> Main Web Site: http://pauldotcom.com
>>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Pauldotcom mailing list
> [email protected]
> http://mail.pauldotcom.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pauldotcom
> Main Web Site: http://pauldotcom.com
>
_______________________________________________
Pauldotcom mailing list
[email protected]
http://mail.pauldotcom.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pauldotcom
Main Web Site: http://pauldotcom.com

Reply via email to