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wurmlab / sequenceserver

Intuitive graphical web interface for running BLAST bioinformatics tool (i.e. have your own custom NCBI BLAST site!)
https://sequenceserver.com
GNU Affero General Public License v3.0
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Add Cross-Site-Forgery-Request (CSRF) protection #753

Closed tadast closed 2 months ago

tadast commented 2 months ago

Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) is a type of malicious exploit of a website where unauthorized commands are transmitted from a user that the web application trusts. Without the user's knowledge, the attacker tricks the victim into performing actions on their behalf. i.e. copy-pasting JS commands to dev tools console or similar. This vulnerability exploits the trust that a site has in a user's browser, allowing attackers to perform actions on behalf of the user without their consent or awareness.

To protect from this attack we're adding a crsf token, that is generated randomly, stored in session, and added to each form submission/POST request. Requests fail if the token value submitted does not match the value in the session, significantly reducing the risk of malicious or unintentional requests on behalf of the user.

While this is not really necessary for locally running instances or public instances, folks hosting their own private instances or exposing locally hosted instances to the internet will benefit from this.

nathanweeks commented 2 weeks ago

@tadast Did the ability to POST an input_sequence (https://github.com/wurmlab/sequenceserver/issues/491) break (InvalidCsrfToken error) when CSRF protection was added?

tadast commented 2 weeks ago

@tadast Did the ability to POST an input_sequence (#491) break (InvalidCsrfToken error) when CSRF protection was added?

Hi @nathanweeks, very likely yes. Unfortunately this is an undocumented feature that very few users use, so it may take a bit longer to update.

If you have any capacity, we'd welcome a PR which either optionally turns on this feature but with CSRF protection disabled for this endpoint, or alternatively allows to configure whitelisted hostnames from where the CSRF token can be fetched (this might need to be in the same domain for the session cookie to be valid). The latter is much more involved