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I'm working on an application that parses a CSRF token from a cookie header. I'd like to know whether CSRF tokens are base64 encoded with URL-safe characters (cf. https://simplycalc.com/base64url-encode.php) so that I can match them with the regular expression

[.a-zA-Z0-9_-]+

I was able to find documentation on JSON web tokens (JWTs) indicating that they consist of base64url-encoded portions separated by periods ('.'), but I wasn't able to find similar documentation on CSRF tokens.

Are CSRF tokens also generally limited to a certain character set, or can they contain any characters?

Kurt Peek
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  • CSRF tokens can be generated in many different ways, this is impossible to answer without knowing which framework generated this particular CSRF token. What framework is generating the CSRF token in question? – Alex Oct 15 '19 at 03:40

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A CSRF token is an opaque "nonce" that doesn't contain any info -- the token in the form submission and the token in the cookie or header simply have to match is all. If you see them base64-encoded, it's just for convenience of transmission, but it won't decode to anything useful, just random bytes most of the time. Nothing like the JSON structure of JWT.

Looking at my current framework (Laravel), its CSRF tokens are just random strings (they're derived from base64, but not valid base64). Chances are that's the case for most other frameworks too.

Chuck Adams
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