Securing forms with a token
This recipe presents another very simple technique that will safeguard your forms against Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF) attacks. Simply put, a CSRF attack is possible when, possibly using other techniques, an attacker is able to infect a web page on your website. In most cases, the infected page will then start issuing requests (that is, using JavaScript to purchase items, or make settings changes) using the credentials of a valid, logged-in user. It's extremely difficult for your application to detect such activity. One measure that can easily be taken is to generate a random token that is included in every form to be submitted. Since the infected page will not have access to the token, nor have the ability to generate one that matches, form validation will fail.
How to do it...
- First, to demonstrate the problem, we create a web page that simulates an infected page that generates a request to post an entry to the database. For this illustration, we will...
