tl;dr
I stumbled upon some CSRF flaws in a very popular e-commerce website. CSRF flaws are generally overlooked and the only way for you as the user to minimize the risk is to logout from a website after you finished using it. This will limit the window of being vulnerable to attacks to the time you spend on a website. I have disclosed my finding to the e-commerce website and will post it here after they’ll finish fixing it.
This is how these CSRF flaws generally works
When you login to a website you get back a cookie that indicates who you are and the fact that you are authenticated.
Now, for better user experience and so you won’t need to re-login, most websites tell your browser to keeps the cookie for very very long time (up to 10 years is considered safe).
The problem is that if a website suffers from any CSRF flaws, and many still do, from now-on every-time you visit any unrelated internet content it may be attacking you. Think of all these slightly phishy content you stumbled upon over the past years, some of it could have been attacking you.
A famous case of CSRF attack against a bank was using a legitimate AD and abused a flaw in the bank website to transfer user’s money. Gmail suffered from a CSRF flaw in its early days, leaking all of its user’s contacts.
CSRF flaws are used to steal sensitive data from users and to perform actions on the user’s behalf. The flaw I found enables both – an attacker can steal user’s personal data and also mess with his assets.
How I stumbled upon it
**I was surfing on an open public WiFi – generally a bad thing to do but I needed to. This public WiFi had a phishy name “eyes2” and there are few other “eyes” circling around – “eyes1”, “eyes2”, “eyes3”, etc’. Call me paranoid but it seems to me that these access points were put there in order to eavesdrop. Might be just for fun might be more. Anyhow, I generally don’t care as long as I keep all of my traffic in SSL. I don’t care them getting my metadata. So I went to this huge e-commerce website just to check something and was amazed it’s not all SSLed. Wow… I wondered… what kind of data have I just leaked to the MITM from the “eyes2” access point?! Apparently, if someone is eavesdropping on my connection he now knew exactly who I am and more.
The fact that any website that deals with even slightly sensitive data, and doesn’t use SSL for all of its traffic is a flaw on its own. But SSL is not related to these specific flaws, in fact using SSL doesn’t help to prevent CSRF flaws. It’s only because I wanted to know exactly what kind of data this website leaked by using plain http and not https (SSL), I found out it’s also vulnerable to CSRF attacks.
Where are all the details?
**I reported my finding to the e-commerce website. It took me way longer to find the appropriate way to contact them than to find the flaws and PoC it. I did eventually managed to report it and they were very responsive about it and seemed like they already started to fix it. I will post all the details after they’ll finish fixing it.
As a website owner it’s important to remember to implement CSRF prevention from the get go. Most web frameworks have their own solutions already. It’s very easy to overlook it. It’s very easy to use something like JSONP and to forget how vulnerable it can be, for example.
How to protect yourself
CSRF is generally based on cookies, what you can do to protect yourself is to logout or delete your cookies after you finished using a certain website. That won’t be bulletproof since you’ll still be vulnerable to attacks while you’re logged-in. The only way to be completely safe is to use only 1 window with only 1 tab while you are logged-in.
Obviously all of this is a complete hassle, and website owners should be the ones responsible for their CSRF flaws. The user can’t be expected to do it.
If your using firefox you may use something like noscript, which also involve some level of annoyance.