Description
Cross-Site Request Forgeries (CSRF) have been a constant threat to websites and web
applications since their early days. Though there are vulnerability scanners, both
proprietary and open-source, obtainable on the market for today’s developers, the
research available on the evaluation of those penetration testing tools shows that
analysis of CSRF vulnerabilities is consistently lacking. Albeit not scarce, information
online surrounding CSRF and its prevention in the context of modern browsers is
furthermore scattered and occasionally rather vague. For those reasons, this bachelor’s
thesis brings an exhaustive systematic overview of CSRF and explains how this attack
type is influenced by technologies and policies active in present-day browsers. It
also thoroughly examines available mitigation techniques via tokens and cookies
and defence-in-depth mechanisms for CSRF. We furthermore investigate the art of
constructing web vulnerability scanners and build a tool of our own which is capable
of detecting endpoints susceptible to CSRF attacks. We tested our vulnerability scanner
against six web applications used by the Technical University of Munich (TUM), leading
to the discovery of a bug in one.
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