Security: XSRF Protection

Cross-Site Request Forgery (XSRF) is an attack technique by which the attacker can trick an authenticated user into unknowingly executing actions on your website. Elixor supports a common mechanism used to prevent XSRF attacks. When performing HTTP requests, an interceptor reads a token from a cookie, by default XSRF-TOKEN, and sets it as an HTTP header, X-XSRF-TOKEN. Since only code that runs on your domain could read the cookie, the backend can be certain that the HTTP request came from your client application and not an attacker.

By default, an interceptor sends this cookie on all mutating requests (POST, etc.) to relative URLs but not on GET/HEAD requests or on requests with an absolute URL.

To take advantage of this, your server needs to set a token in a JavaScript readable session cookie called XSRF-TOKEN on either the page load or the first GET request. On subsequent requests the server can verify that the cookie matches the X-XSRF-TOKEN HTTP header, and therefore be sure that only code running on your domain could have sent the request. The token must be unique for each user and must be verifiable by the server; this prevents the client from making up its own tokens. Set the token to a digest of your site's authentication cookie with a salt for added security.

In order to prevent collisions in environments where multiple Angular apps share the same domain or subdomain, give each application a unique cookie name.

Note that Elixor supports only the client half of the XSRF protection scheme. Your backend service must be configured to set the cookie for your page, and to verify that the header is present on all eligible requests. If not, Angular's default protection will be ineffective.

Configuring custom cookie/header names

If your backend service uses different names for the XSRF token cookie or header, use ElixorModule.Initialize() to override the defaults.

App.tsx

import { ElixorModule } from 'elixor';

export default class App extends React.Component{
    constructor(){
      ElixorModule.initialize({
        XSRFCookieName:'COOKIE_NAME',
        XSRFHeaderName:'HEADER_NAME'
      });
    }
    
    render(){.....}
  }