Chapter 3: Cross-Domain Attacks 77
??? Are the parameters to valid requests submitted by other users predictable by the
attacker? Along with predicting the command structure necessary to perform an
action as another user, an attacker also needs to guess the proper parameters to
make that action valid.
What Is the Level of Risk to an Application?
It is rare to find a web application in which the majority of HTTP requests could not be
forged across domains, yet the actual risk to the owners and users of these applications
vary greatly based upon a complicated interplay of technical and business variables. We
would consider a bank application with a CSRF attack that takes thousands of attempts
by an attacker to change a user??™s password more dangerous than an attack that can add
spam to a blog??™s comments perfectly reliably. These are some of the factors that need to
be taken into account when judging the danger of a CSRF attack:
??? The greatest damage caused by a successful attack Generally CSRF
vulnerabilities are endemic across an entire application if they exist at all. In this
situation, it is important to identify the actions that, if falsi?¬? ed by a malicious
web site, can cause the greatest damage or result in the greatest ?¬? nancial gain
for an attacker.
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