Security Class

The Security Class contains methods that help protect your site against Cross-Site Request Forgery attacks.

• Loading the Library
• Cross-site request forgery (CSRF)
• Other Helpful Methods

Loading the Library

If your only interest in loading the library is to handle CSRF protection, then you will never need to load it, as it runs as a filter and has no manual interaction.

If you find a case where you do need direct access though, you may load it through the Services file:

$security = \Config\Services::security();

Cross-site request forgery (CSRF)

You can enable CSRF protection by altering your app/Config/Filters.php and enabling the csrf filter globally:

public $globals = [
        'before' => [
                //'honeypot'
                'csrf'
        ]
];

Select URIs can be whitelisted from CSRF protection (for example API endpoints expecting externally POSTed content). You can add these URIs by adding them as exceptions in the filter:

public $globals = [
        'before' => [
                'csrf' => ['except' => ['api/record/save']]
        ]
];

Regular expressions are also supported (case-insensitive):

public $globals = [
            'before' => [
                    'csrf' => ['except' => ['api/record/[0-9]+']]
            ]
    ];

If you use the form helper, then form_open() will automatically insert a hidden csrf field in your forms. If not, then you can use the always available csrf_token() and csrf_hash() functions

<input type="hidden" name="<?= csrf_token() ?>" value="<?= csrf_hash() ?>" />

Additionally, you can use the csrf_field() method to generate this hidden input field for you:

// Generates: <input type="hidden" name="{csrf_token}" value="{csrf_hash}" />
<?= csrf_field() ?>

When sending a JSON request the CSRF token can also be passed as one of the parameters. The next way to pass the CSRF token is a special Http header that’s name is available by csrf_header() function.

Additionally, you can use the csrf_meta() method to generate this handy meta tag for you:

// Generates: <meta name="{csrf_header}" content="{csrf_hash}" />
<?= csrf_meta() ?>

The order of checking the avability of the CSRF token is as follows:

1. $_POST array
2. Http header
3. php://input (JSON request) - bare in mind that this approach is the slowest one since we have to decode JSON and then encode it again

Tokens may be either regenerated on every submission (default) or kept the same throughout the life of the CSRF cookie. The default regeneration of tokens provides stricter security, but may result in usability concerns as other tokens become invalid (back/forward navigation, multiple tabs/windows, asynchronous actions, etc). You may alter this behavior by editing the following config parameter

public $CSRFRegenerate  = true;

When a request fails the CSRF validation check, it will redirect to the previous page by default, setting an error flash message that you can display to the end user. This provides a nicer experience than simply crashing. This can be turned off by editing the $CSRFRedirect value in app/Config/App.php:

public $CSRFRedirect = false;

Even when the redirect value is true, AJAX calls will not redirect, but will throw an error.

Other Helpful Methods

You will never need to use most of the methods in the Security class directly. The following are methods that you might find helpful that are not related to the CSRF protection.

sanitizeFilename()

Tries to sanitize filenames in order to prevent directory traversal attempts and other security threats, which is particularly useful for files that were supplied via user input. The first parameter is the path to sanitize.

If it is acceptable for the user input to include relative paths, e.g. file/in/some/approved/folder.txt, you can set the second optional parameter, $relative_path to true.

$path = $security->sanitizeFilename($request->getVar('filepath'));