Cross-site request forgery (CSRF) attacks leverage social engineering principles to trick users into submitting malicious requests. The web application also has no reliable way to distinguish between legitimate requests from an authenticated user and harmful requests, which makes these attacks harder to stop.
The target isn't necessarily the user but is instead a server or another backend resource containing sensitive data. A CSRF attack's goal is to cause state changes on the server and secretly manipulate data. The severity of this depends on the attacker's motivation, nature of the malicious attack vector itself, and level of penetration into the targeted system.
How do cross-site request forgery (CSRF) attacks work?
CSRF attacks aim to alter data stored on a server. However, the act of having the user grab data via malicious requests doesn't benefit the attacker. Gaining access to the server and databases that process those requests does, which is why request forgery attacks often change things such as passwords and email addresses. They can also force online shopping carts, fund transfers, and more.
An end user simply triggers these actions unexpectedly via those malicious requests. Cross-site request forgery leverages a user's credentials (such as a session cookie) to work effectively and gain backend access. This process is often automated.
Other CSRF variants can grant an unauthenticated user access to an account the attacker controls, it's possible to obtain credit card numbers, addresses and contact information, or anything else a user might unwittingly submit.
Finally, stored cross-site request forgery attacks are possible—much like with XSS attacks. By embedding malicious scripts (hosted on the attacker's server) within HTML tags or webpage elements, an attacker can impact more systems. In these scenarios, website users are often already authenticated and therefore in a trusted place, lowering their skepticism.
Can HAProxy help mitigate cross-site request forgery (CSRF) attacks?
Yes! HAProxy Enterprise includes our HAProxy Enterprise WAF, built on top of our Intelligent WAF Engine, to successfully detect and block CSRF attacks before they reach your systems. An included OWASP CRS compatibility mode with massively boosted performance guarantees fast and accurate threat detection that's as simple or customizable as you'd like.
To learn more about security and WAF in HAProxy Enterprise, check out our security solution page or our Announcing HAProxy Enterprise 2.9 blog post.
