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How Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) Works in Ruby on Rails

February 8, 2022

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Your Teacher

Hi, I'm Chris. I'm the creator of GoRails, Hatchbox.io and Jumpstart. I spend my time creating tutorials and tools to help Ruby on Rails developers build apps better and faster.

About This Episode

Ever gotten an InvalidAuthentictyToken error in Rails and wondered how CSRF works? In this lesson, we'll learn how it works behind the scenes so you can understand exactly what's going on.

Notes

Resources

Add this code to your ApplicationController to see how Rails compares the CSRF tokens you sent to the CSRF token in your application.

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
  protect_from_forgery with: :exception

  before_action do
    p "👋"
    p "real #{real_csrf_token(session)}"
    p "global #{global_csrf_token(session)}"

    request_authenticity_tokens.each do |token|
      next if token.nil?

      decoded_token = decode_csrf_token(token)
      if decoded_token.length == AUTHENTICITY_TOKEN_LENGTH * 2
        p unmask_token(decoded_token)
      else
        p decoded_token
      end
    end
  end
end

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