gorilla/csrf provides Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF) prevention middleware for Go web applications & services. Prior to 1.7.2, gorilla/csrf does not validate the Origin header against an allowlist. Its executes its validation of the Referer header for cross-origin requests only when it believes the request is being served over TLS. It determines this by inspecting the r.URL.Scheme value. However, this value is never populated for server requests per the Go spec, and so this check does not run in practice. This vulnerability allows an attacker who has gained XSS on a subdomain or top level domain to perform authenticated form submissions against gorilla/csrf protected targets that share the same top level domain. This vulnerability is fixed in 1.7.2.
Weakness
The web application does not, or can not, sufficiently verify whether a well-formed, valid, consistent request was intentionally provided by the user who submitted the request.
Potential Mitigations
- Use a vetted library or framework that does not allow this weakness to occur or provides constructs that make this weakness easier to avoid.
- For example, use anti-CSRF packages such as the OWASP CSRFGuard. [REF-330]
- Another example is the ESAPI Session Management control, which includes a component for CSRF. [REF-45]
- Use the “double-submitted cookie” method as described by Felten and Zeller:
- When a user visits a site, the site should generate a pseudorandom value and set it as a cookie on the user’s machine. The site should require every form submission to include this value as a form value and also as a cookie value. When a POST request is sent to the site, the request should only be considered valid if the form value and the cookie value are the same.
- Because of the same-origin policy, an attacker cannot read or modify the value stored in the cookie. To successfully submit a form on behalf of the user, the attacker would have to correctly guess the pseudorandom value. If the pseudorandom value is cryptographically strong, this will be prohibitively difficult.
- This technique requires Javascript, so it may not work for browsers that have Javascript disabled. [REF-331]
References