Published: 06 August 2021    Last Updated: 03 November 2022

Often abbreviated to CSRF and often pronounced as “Sea-Surf” is an attack against a Web Application that abuses an application’s trust in the user. An attacker’s aim is to cause a function to execute on the application using the user’s authentication credentials simply by causing the user’s browser to request that function in the normal way, but from a malicious site.

For example, a user navigates to a malicious site and this site in turn sends a request to the vulnerable function on the vulnerable web site. This is where “Cross-site” comes from, it is a malicious site sending a request to the vulnerable site.