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CSRF Protection - Laravel 12.x - The PHP Framework For Web Artisans

The document provides an overview of Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) protection in Laravel, explaining how CSRF attacks can occur and how Laravel's built-in mechanisms help prevent them. It details the use of CSRF tokens in forms, the ability to exclude specific URIs from CSRF protection, and the use of X-CSRF-TOKEN and X-XSRF-TOKEN headers for AJAX requests. Additionally, it mentions the integration of CSRF protection in Single Page Applications (SPAs) and the convenience provided by Laravel's middleware for managing these tokens.

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0% found this document useful (0 votes)
23 views6 pages

CSRF Protection - Laravel 12.x - The PHP Framework For Web Artisans

The document provides an overview of Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) protection in Laravel, explaining how CSRF attacks can occur and how Laravel's built-in mechanisms help prevent them. It details the use of CSRF tokens in forms, the ability to exclude specific URIs from CSRF protection, and the use of X-CSRF-TOKEN and X-XSRF-TOKEN headers for AJAX requests. Additionally, it mentions the integration of CSRF protection in Single Page Applications (SPAs) and the convenience provided by Laravel's middleware for managing these tokens.

Uploaded by

etheosoft
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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v12.

CSRF Protection
# Introduction

# Preventing CSRF Requests


# Excluding URIs

# X-CSRF-Token

# X-XSRF-Token

# Introduction
Cross-site request forgeries are a type of malicious exploit whereby unauthorized
commands are performed on behalf of an authenticated user. Thankfully, Laravel
makes it easy to protect your application from cross-site request forgery (CSRF)
attacks.

# An Explanation of the Vulnerability


In case you're not familiar with cross-site request forgeries, let's discuss an example of
how this vulnerability can be exploited. Imagine your application has a /user/email
route that accepts a POST request to change the authenticated user's email address.
Most likely, this route expects an email input field to contain the email address the user
would like to begin using.

Without CSRF protection, a malicious website could create an HTML form that points
to your application's /user/email route and submits the malicious user's own email
address:
1 <form action="https://your-application.com/user/email" method="POST">
2 <input type="email" value="[email protected]">
3 </form>
4
5 <script>
6 document.forms[0].submit();
7 </script>

If the malicious website automatically submits the form when the page is loaded, the
malicious user only needs to lure an unsuspecting user of your application to visit their
website and their email address will be changed in your application.

To prevent this vulnerability, we need to inspect every incoming POST , PUT , PATCH , or
DELETE request for a secret session value that the malicious application is unable to

access.

# Preventing CSRF Requests


Laravel automatically generates a CSRF "token" for each active user session managed
by the application. This token is used to verify that the authenticated user is the person
actually making the requests to the application. Since this token is stored in the user's
session and changes each time the session is regenerated, a malicious application is
unable to access it.

The current session's CSRF token can be accessed via the request's session or via the
csrf_token helper function:

1 use Illuminate\Http\Request;
2
3 Route::get('/token', function (Request $request) {
4 $token = $request->session()->token();
5
6 $token = csrf_token();
7
8 // ...
9 });

Anytime you define a "POST", "PUT", "PATCH", or "DELETE" HTML form in your
application, you should include a hidden CSRF _token field in the form so that the CSRF
protection middleware can validate the request. For convenience, you may use the
@csrf Blade directive to generate the hidden token input field:

1 <form method="POST" action="/profile">


2 @csrf
3
4 <!-- Equivalent to... -->
5 <input type="hidden" name="_token" value="{{ csrf_token() }}" />
6 </form>

The Illuminate\Foundation\Http\Middleware\ValidateCsrfToken middleware, which is


included in the web middleware group by default, will automatically verify that the
token in the request input matches the token stored in the session. When these two
tokens match, we know that the authenticated user is the one initiating the request.

# CSRF Tokens & SPAs


If you are building an SPA that is utilizing Laravel as an API backend, you should consult
the Laravel Sanctum documentation for information on authenticating with your API
and protecting against CSRF vulnerabilities.

# Excluding URIs From CSRF Protection


Sometimes you may wish to exclude a set of URIs from CSRF protection. For example, if
you are using Stripe to process payments and are utilizing their webhook system, you
will need to exclude your Stripe webhook handler route from CSRF protection since
Stripe will not know what CSRF token to send to your routes.

Typically, you should place these kinds of routes outside of the web middleware group
that Laravel applies to all routes in the routes/web.php file. However, you may also
exclude specific routes by providing their URIs to the validateCsrfTokens method in
your application's bootstrap/app.php file:

1 ->withMiddleware(function (Middleware $middleware) {


2 $middleware->validateCsrfTokens(except: [
3 'stripe/*',
4 'http://example.com/foo/bar',
5 'http://example.com/foo/*',
6 ]);
7 })

For convenience, the CSRF middleware is automatically disabled for all routes
when running tests.

# X-CSRF-TOKEN
In addition to checking for the CSRF token as a POST parameter, the
Illuminate\Foundation\Http\Middleware\ValidateCsrfToken middleware, which is

included in the web middleware group by default, will also check for the X-CSRF-TOKEN
request header. You could, for example, store the token in an HTML meta tag:

1 <meta name="csrf-token" content="{{ csrf_token() }}">

Then, you can instruct a library like jQuery to automatically add the token to all request
headers. This provides simple, convenient CSRF protection for your AJAX based
applications using legacy JavaScript technology:

1 $.ajaxSetup({
2 headers: {
3 'X-CSRF-TOKEN': $('meta[name="csrf-token"]').attr('content')
4 }
5 });

# X-XSRF-TOKEN
Laravel stores the current CSRF token in an encrypted XSRF-TOKEN cookie that is
included with each response generated by the framework. You can use the cookie
value to set the X-XSRF-TOKEN request header.

This cookie is primarily sent as a developer convenience since some JavaScript


frameworks and libraries, like Angular and Axios, automatically place its value in the
X-XSRF-TOKEN header on same-origin requests.

By default, the resources/js/bootstrap.js file includes the Axios HTTP library which
will automatically send the X-XSRF-TOKEN header for you.

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