django: csrftoken COOKIE vs. csrfmiddlewaretoken HTML Form value

Question

Trying to learn about security. Curious about why in django when submitting a form (a POST), there are 2 separate "elements" that contain the same csrf token value:

- the csrftoken cookie:
     COOKIES:{'csrftoken': '1effe96056e91a8f58461ad56c0d4ddc', ...

- the Form's hidden csrfmiddlewaretoken:
     POST:<QueryDict: {u'csrfmiddlewaretoken': 
                       [u'1effe96056e91a8f58461ad56c0d4ddc'], ...

If django is inserting the hidden csrf field/value to the form when it sends it to the browser (GET), and expects the same value back when receiving the POST, then why is it necessary to also set a cookie?

A more general question, if either of them was missing (form, cookie), could you provide a scenario that explains how this could be exploited (security attack)?

By the way, I ran a couple of simple tests to make sure that django was checking the validity of each one separately and indeed it is:

• if I change the form's csrf value before doing the POST, I get this debug error back:

  CSRF token missing or incorrect

• if I delete the csrf cookie before doing the POST, I get a different error back:

  CSRF cookie not set.

I'm just familiar with basic csrf concepts and want to learn how django helps protect against these types of attacks.

Thanks,

jd

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update:

Although both answers (S.Lott and M. DeSimone) were informative and make sense, I thought that there could be a more detailed explanation for requiring the presence of the security value in both the form and in the cookie. While searching outside stackoverflow.com, I came across a blog post from...Jeff Atwood.

I have included a third answer (sorry to answer my own question but I think that it is relevant supplemental info) that refers to a blog post from Jeff and includes a quotation.

Answer 1

From Jeff Atwood's blog entry:

Preventing CSRF and XSRF Attacks (Oct 14, 2008)

The original post

The Felten and Zeller paper (pdf) recommends the "double-submitted cookie" method to prevent XSRF:

When a user visits a site, the site should generate a (cryptographically strong) pseudorandom value and set it as a cookie on the user's machine. The site should require every form submission to include this pseudorandom value as a form value and also as a cookie value. When a POST request is sent to the site, the request should only be considered valid if the form value and the cookie value are the same. When an attacker submits a form on behalf of a user, he can only modify the values of the form. An attacker cannot read any data sent from the server or modify cookie values, per the same-origin policy. This means that while an attacker can send any value he wants with the form, he will be unable to modify or read the value stored in the cookie. Since the cookie value and the form value must be the same, the attacker will be unable to successfully submit a form unless he is able to guess the pseudorandom value.

The advantage of this approach is that it requires no server state; you simply set the cookie value once, then every HTTP POST checks to ensure that one of the submitted values contains the exact same cookie value. Any difference between the two means a possible XSRF attack.

Answer 2

The cookie is there for AJAX support. Quoting the Django docs:

While the above method can be used for AJAX POST requests, it has some inconveniences: you have to remember to pass the CSRF token in as POST data with every POST request. For this reason, there is an alternative method: on each XMLHttpRequest, set a custom X-CSRFToken header to the value of the CSRF token. This is often easier, because many javascript frameworks provide hooks that allow headers to be set on every request. In jQuery, you can use the ajaxSend event as follows:

$('html').ajaxSend(function(event, xhr, settings) {
    function getCookie(name) {
        var cookieValue = null;
        if (document.cookie && document.cookie != '') {
            var cookies = document.cookie.split(';');
            for (var i = 0; i < cookies.length; i++) {
                var cookie = jQuery.trim(cookies[i]);
                // Does this cookie string begin with the name we want?
                if (cookie.substring(0, name.length + 1) == (name + '=')) {
                    cookieValue = decodeURIComponent(cookie.substring(name.length + 1));
                    break;
                }
            }
        }
        return cookieValue;
    }
    if (!(/^http:.*/.test(settings.url) || /^https:.*/.test(settings.url))) {
        // Only send the token to relative URLs i.e. locally.
        xhr.setRequestHeader("X-CSRFToken", getCookie('csrftoken'));
    }
});

Adding this to a javascript file that is included on your site will ensure that AJAX POST requests that are made via jQuery will not be caught by the CSRF protection.

Answer 3

They spot two different problems.

Cookie is to authenticate the client machine making the connection.

The hidden form field is to authenticate the source of the form.

Example Scenario: User A, on the client machine could bookmark the form. User B logs on, gets a valid cookie from today. User A could submit the invalid form field from yesterday when the browser has a left-over cookie from user B's session.

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what client/browser resources are typically compromised,

None.

and how is it that these csrf fields help protect us from the forgery requests?

The CSRF tokens establish identity.

One (and only one) browser has a CSRF cookie token. But that browser could have multiple copies of a site open or bookmarked forms.

One (and only one) page form on that browser has a CSRF form token.

The browser and form cookies must match to assure one browser/one form.