Current state of client-side extensions aimed at protecting against CSRF-like attacks

For over a decade now, cross-site request forgery (CSRF) has been persistently named one of the OWASP's top 10 Web vulnerabilities. Recently, a variant of CSRF — named cross-site framing attack (CSFA) — has also been identified. Both attacks are very simple to implement/execute while resulting in potentially devastating consequences for the victim. What distinguishes the two attacks is their ultimate objective. CSRF generally aims to simulate the user/victim action on an authenticated site, thereby causing damage to the victim's security and/or privacy. CSFA, on the other hand, could target both authenticated and non-authenticated Web sites, and generally aims to harm the victim's reputation. To date, a number of client- and server-side mechanisms of protection against CSRF and CSFA have been proposed. Unfortunately, the implementation of these mechanisms is neither regulated nor mandated by the Web industry. Hence, often times, the user's best bet against CSRF and CSFA is general vigilance and/or the use of protective client-side extensions. The aim of our work was to survey the current state of Chrome-based extensions that claim to protect against CSRF (and CSFA). The results of our study have shown that, out of the five identified extensions that fall into this category, none of the extensions are effective in blocking all examined variants of CSRF and CSFA. The extensions examined do not only fail to provide comprehensive protection against CSRF and CSFA, but also exhibit a number of other deficiencies, and therefore cannot be recommended as effective anti-SRF and CSFA tools.