Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) is a security vulnerability where attackers trick an authenticated user into executing unwanted actions on a web application. By exploiting the trust a site has in the user’s browser, an attacker can make requests on behalf of the user, potentially causing actions like making unauthorized purchases or transferring funds. Understanding and mitigating CSRF attacks is critical for any web developer, especially when using frameworks like ASP.NET Core.
This article will explore how CSRF attacks work and provide guidance on how to prevent them in ASP.NET Core 6. We’ll go through the steps of setting up an ASP.NET Core MVC project in Visual Studio 2022, and show how to implement security measures to safeguard against CSRF. If you haven’t already installed Visual Studio 2022, you can download it from the official website to follow along with the examples.
To start, you’ll need to create a new ASP.NET Core 6 project in Visual Studio 2022. Open Visual Studio and begin by selecting the “Create new project” option. From the available templates, choose “ASP.NET Core Web App (Model-View-Controller)” and click Next. Then, provide the necessary project details, such as the name and location, and click Next again. In the “Additional Information” window, ensure you select .NET 6.0 as the target framework and leave the default settings for authentication, Docker, and Razor runtime compilation. Once you click Create, Visual Studio will generate the base MVC project for your application.
With your project set up, the next step will be to implement the necessary protections against CSRF attacks. ASP.NET Core provides built-in mechanisms to prevent these attacks, such as anti-forgery tokens. These tokens are included in forms and verified with each request to ensure that the request originated from the intended source. In the following sections, we’ll dive into configuring these protections and demonstrate how to apply them effectively in your web application.