Cross-Site Request Forgery Mitigation via Trust Token Validation
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Solution Overview
Problem
Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) attacks pose a significant threat in electronic environments, particularly in web sites that use state management, cookies, or client-side certificates for authentication, as they allow unauthorized submissions that appear to originate from trusted users, making it difficult to verify the authenticity of user requests originating from third-party sites.
Innovation Solution
Establishing a secure communication channel between an electronic marketplace and a third-party web site using a trust token, where the token is generated by the marketplace and validated on the client-side, ensuring that only authorized requests are processed by including the token in submissions and using client-side scripting to sandbox sensitive information, preventing external execution and ensuring same-origin policies.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Adaptability or versatility
If the electronic marketplace allows processing requests from third-party Web sites to increase revenue, then business versatility and revenue potential are improved, but the risk of CSRF attacks and unauthorized submissions increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces a trust token as an intermediary mechanism between the electronic marketplace and third-party sites. This token is generated by the marketplace, transmitted to the third-party site through a secure channel, and then validated by the marketplace when processing requests. The trust token acts as a mediator that enables cross-domain request processing while maintaining security verification, thus resolving the contradiction between versatility and security risk.
2Reliability
If the electronic marketplace verifies user request submissions to reduce fraud, then security and reliability are improved, but the complexity of the verification process increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent implements preliminary action by generating and distributing trust tokens in advance through a secure channel before actual request processing occurs. The trust token is pre-established between the marketplace and third-party site, containing verification information that will be used later. This preliminary setup simplifies the actual verification process, as the marketplace only needs to validate the pre-established trust token rather than performing complex real-time verification of each request's authenticity.
Data Source
AI summary
Systems and methods for authenticating a request submitted from a client device through a third party content provider to an electronic entity are described. In one embodiment, a method includes providing a trusted script to the third party content provider, passing a trust token to the third party content provider and to the client device, and, in response to a request submitted from the client device through the third party content provider, validating the trust token associated with the request with the token passed to the client device, and processing the request. The trusted script is configured to create a trusted window on the third party Web page displayed on the client computing device, receive a trust token from the electronic entity through the trusted window, and associate the trust token with requests submitted from the client computing device through the third party content provider to the electronic entity.