Twitter Hijacking

[johnemiller at gmail.com (John Miller)]

For CSRF, the token just needs to change for each submission. It can only be
used once, so sniffing it is pointless. I didn't take a closer look at
exactly how Twitter handles this, but generally, a cookie will store the
Authentication data while a hidden field stores a per-request token to
prevent CSRF.

What this is protecting against is a 3rd party site including something like
<img src="http://twitter/doSomthingBad";>. Since they won't have the single
use token, that request can't do anything.

On Fri, Nov 20, 2009 at 6:38 PM, Soft Reset <softreset64738 at gmail.com>wrote:

> Makes sense if the connection protected the token.  According to Wikipedia,
>
>
>   "Requiring a secret, user-specific token in all form submissions prevents
>    CSRF; the attacker's site can't put the right token in its 
> submissions.<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-site_request_forgery#cite_note-Shiflett-0>
> [1]"
>
> But if the form Twitter returns (containing the token) is returned over
> HTTP (which it is), the token is not secret and does not need to be
> predicted...just eavesdropped.
>
> Does this sound right or am I way off and misunderstanding the whole
> concept of XSRFs?
>
> --sr6
>
>
> On Fri, Nov 20, 2009 at 3:23 PM, Chris Biettchert <
> chris.biettchert at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > The authenticity_token is used for for xsrf protection. It works as
> > intended as long as it can not be predicted for another user.
> >
> > On Fri, Nov 20, 2009 at 10:36 AM, Soft Reset <softreset64738 at gmail.com>wrote:
> >
> > > I just noticed it and was wondering if anyone else had.  Twitter has
> > > their "authenticity_token" as a 'hidden' input on forms...including password
> > > changes, resets, etc.  Anyone tried hijacking a twitter login to verify this
> > > is bad form (no pun intended)?  Don't want to re-invent the wheel if someone
> > > already did it.
> > >
> > > If someone has tried it successfully, has it been brought up to the
> > > twitter folks as a push for full SSL sessions?  (yeah, I know SSL is also
> > > having issues at the moment, but still...)
> > >
> > > --sr6
> > >
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