XSRF in a RESTful Application

Question

I am a ASP.NET Developer trying to learn Rails and RESTful approach. To understand, I am planning to write a Email client, which would make RESTful GET call to the server to fetch the emails and POST to send an email.

What are the best practices (both generic and/or specific to Rails) to be followed so that, the above application is not exposing any XSRF vulnerabilities.

Answer 1

The Ruby on Rails Security Project has a good post on this.

Essentially, Rails 2.0 and above have built-in protection for XSRF attacks. Every form created via the form helpers includes a hidden field with a special token in it. Each time a POST (or non-GET) is received, the token is checked against a secret on the server. If they don't match, a security exception is thrown and the request is ignored.

Read the article. They do a better job explaining it.