Detecting and protecting against inconsistent use of cross-site request forgery mitigation features

Abstract

The techniques disclosed herein detect Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) vulnerabilities in a web application. In some configurations, CSRF vulnerabilities are detected by analyzing the source code of the web application. Specifically, CSRF vulnerabilities are detected by determining if CSRF mitigation features of one or more frameworks are being used incorrectly or inconsistently. Some CSRF mitigation features provided by web frameworks inject capabilities into the web application, e.g. to automatically store an anti-forgery token in a cookie, copy the anti-forgery token from the cookie into an HTML, form or a request header, or determine whether form submissions or request headers include the same anti-forgery token as the cookie. CSRF vulnerabilities may be detected by analyzing the source code to identify when one of these features is omitted or used incorrectly end-to-end. CSRF vulnerabilities are also detected by identifying when CSRF mitigation features of multiple web frameworks are incompatible.