posted by mthomas on May 9, 2011 07:08 AM

Cross-site request forgery (CSRF), also sometimes referred to as one-click attacks or session riding, is another type of malicious exploit of websites that the Apache Tomcat community has addressed in the Apache Tomcat 7 release process. Different from cross-site scripting, where the attacker exploits the trust users have for a particular site, CSRF targets the trust that sites have in a user’s browser. The new CSRF Protection prevents attacks directly on Apache Tomcat Manager and Apache Tomcat Host Manager as well as provides a CSRF Prevention Filter for the applications that run on Tomcat to use.

A Simple Example

A system administrator connects to a Tomcat instance and logs into the Tomcat Manager application. The admin performs routine tasks such as deploying a web application, checking the status of another application and upgrading a third application. Then the administrator leaves Tomcat Manager, and goes to browse the web. One of the sites the administrator browses has malicious code in either a link or a flash file that tricks the browser into making a request into Tomcat Manager. The admin’s session for Tomcat Manager has not yet expired, and Tomcat grants the malicious code access to the request. This essentially introduces a large back door for control into the system administrator’s Tomcat instances.

In addition to targeting administrators to take down websites, applications that run on Tomcat-such as banking applications-are also vulnerable to the same attacks. Check out the article on CSRF on the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) for more detail.

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