What is CSRF? How does Rails protect against it?

What is CSRF? How does Rails protect against it?




CSRF stands for Cross-Site Request Forgery. This is a form of an attack where the attacker submits a form on your behalf to a different website, potentially causing damage or revealing sensitive information. Since browsers will automatically include cookies for a domain on a request, if you were recently logged in to the target site, the attacker's request will appear to come from you as a logged-in user (as your session cookie will be sent with the POST request).

In order to protect against CSRF attacks, you can add protect_from_forgery to your ApplicationController. This will then cause Rails to require a CSRF token to be present before accepting any POST, PUT, or DELETE requests. The CSRF token is included as a hidden field in every form created using Rails' form builders. It is also included as a header in GET requests so that other, non-form-based mechanisms for sending a POST can use it as well. Attackers are prevented from stealing the CSRF token by browsers' "same origin" policy.

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