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Protecting against CSRF attacks in ASP.Net MVC

Posted on Wednesday, January 25, 2012, at 11:18:00 PM UTC

CSRF attacks are one of the many security issues that web developers must defend against.  Fortunately, ASP.Net MVC makes it easy to defend against CSRF attacks.  Simply slap on [ValidateAntiForgeryToken] to every POST action and include @Html.AntiForgeryToken() in every form, and your forms will be secure against CSRF.

However, it is easy to forget to apply [ValidateAntiForgeryToken] to every action.  To prevent such mistakes, you can create a unit test that loops through all of your controller actions and makes sure that every [HttpPost] action also has [ValidateAntiForgeryToken]. 

Since there may be some POST actions that should not be protected against CSRF, you’ll probably also want a marker attribute to tell the test to ignore some actions.

This can be implemented like this:

First, define the marker attribute in the MVC web project.  This attribute can be applied to a single action, or to a controller to allow every action in the controller.

///<summary>Indicates that an action or controller deliberately 
/// allows CSRF attacks.</summary>
///<remarks>All [HttpPost] actions must have 
/// [ValidateAntiForgeryToken]; any deliberately unprotected 
/// actions must be marked with this attribute.
/// This rule is enforced by a unit test.</remarks>
[AttributeUsage(AttributeTargets.Class | AttributeTargets.Method)]
public sealed class AllowCsrfAttacksAttribute : Attribute { }

Then, add the following unit test:

[TestMethod]
public void CheckForCsrfProtection() {
    var controllers = typeof(MvcApplication).Assembly.GetTypes().Where(typeof(IController).IsAssignableFrom);
    foreach (var type in controllers.Where(t => !t.IsDefined(typeof(AllowCsrfAttacksAttribute), true))) {
        var postActions = type.GetMethods()
                                .Where(m => !m.ContainsGenericParameters)
                                .Where(m => !m.IsDefined(typeof(ChildActionOnlyAttribute), true))
                                .Where(m => !m.IsDefined(typeof(NonActionAttribute), true))
                                .Where(m => !m.GetParameters().Any(p => p.IsOut || p.ParameterType.IsByRef))
                                .Where(m => m.IsDefined(typeof(HttpPostAttribute), true));

        foreach (var action in postActions) {
            //CSRF XOR AntiForgery
            Assert.IsTrue(action.IsDefined(typeof(AllowCsrfAttacksAttribute), true) != action.IsDefined(typeof(ValidateAntiForgeryTokenAttribute), true),
                            action.Name + " is [HttpPost] but not [ValidateAntiForgeryToken]");
        }
    }
}

typeof(MvcApplication) must be any type in the assembly that contains your controllers.  If your controllers are defined in multiple assemblies, you’ll need to include those assemblies too.

Categories: C#, security, .Net, ASP.Net MVC Tweet this post

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