Intermediate Application Mediator for CSRF Token Protection
Find Innovative SolutionsGenerate Solutions
Solution Overview
Problem
Agent applications interfacing with third-party applications are vulnerable to cross-site request forgery (CSRF) attacks, as they often rely on security tokens that can be compromised, allowing unauthorized access to sensitive patient data.
Innovation Solution
An intermediate application acts as an intermediary between the client agent application and the third-party application, enabling the third-party application to provide graphical resources without exposing security tokens to the client agent application. This intermediate application requests a webpage from the third-party application, extracts the security token, constructs a modified URL, and transmits it to the third-party application for authentication and resource generation.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If security tokens are transmitted to the client agent application for CSRF protection, then CSRF attack protection is improved, but the risk of token exposure and unauthorized data access increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces an intermediate application as a mediator between the client agent application and the third-party application. This intermediate application receives CSRF tokens from the third-party application and manages their secure transmission, preventing direct exposure of tokens to the client application while maintaining CSRF protection functionality.
2Reliability
If conventional CSRF protection methods are implemented, then CSRF attack protection is improved, but computational resources and system complexity increase
Solution Approach 1:
The intermediate application centralizes CSRF token management operations, allowing the client agent application to remain simpler. The intermediary handles the complex tasks of token retrieval, validation, and secure transmission, reducing the computational burden on the client application while maintaining robust CSRF protection.
Data Source
AI summary
A server agent application receives a uniform resource locator (URL) from a client agent application, the URL including an identifier for a graphical resource. The server agent application determines, based upon the URL, that a third-party application is to provide the graphical resource. The server agent application causes an intermediate application to be launched. The intermediate application requests a webpage from the third-party application, the webpage including a security token for a user session between the client agent application and the third-party application. The intermediate application receives the webpage and constructs a modified URL based upon the URL and the security token included in the webpage. The intermediate application transmits the modified URL to the third-party application, wherein the third-party application causes the client agent application to receive the graphical resource based upon the modified URL.