My jquery AJAX POST requests works without sending an Authenticity Token (Rails)

Question

Hi all,

Is there any provisions in rails that would allow all AJAX POST requests from the site to pass without an authenticity_token?

I have a Jquery POST ajax call that calls a controller method, but I did not put any authenticity code in it and yet the call succeeds.

My ApplicationController does have 'request_forgery_protection' and I've changed

config.action_controller.consider_all_requests_local

to false in my environments/development.rb

I've also searched my code to ensure that I was not overloading ajaxSend to send out authenticity tokens.

Is there some mechanism in play that disables the check? Now I'm not sure if my CSRF protection is working or not.

I'm using Rails 2.3.5.

Update for clarity:

function voteup(url, groupid){
      $.ajax({
        type: "POST",
        url: "/groups/" + groupid + "/submissions/voteup",
        data: "url=" + url,
        dataType: 'text',
        success: function(data){
          var counter = "vote_" + url;
          $('#vote_' + url.cleanify()).text(" " + data + " ");
        }
      });
    };

I have a link which then has a 'href that calls the above function:

<a href='javascript:voteup(param1,param2)'>...</a>

Answer 1

A likely scenario here is that you're using jQuery to serialize a normal Rails form... and it is including in that the serialized auth token hidden field (Rails adds them to all forms).

Look at your generated source for the form you're submitting... it's likely you'll see

<input name="authenticity_token" type="hidden" value="somethinghere...." />

The other thing you can do is check the log to see if the authenticity_token field is in the request params.

Answer 2

Add this in your layout view: app/views/layouts/(something).html.erb

<% if protect_against_forgery? %>
 <script type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8">
  //<![CDATA[
   window._auth_token_name = "#{request_forgery_protection_token}";
   window._auth_token = "#{form_authenticity_token}";
  //]]>
 </script>
<% end %>

And in your application.js :

$.ajaxSetup({
  'beforeSend': function(xhr) {xhr.setRequestHeader("Accept", "text/javascript")}
});

$(document).ready(function() {
 //  All non-GET requests will add the authenticity token
 //  If not already present in the data packet
 $("body").bind('ajaxSend', function(elm, xhr, s) {
   if (s.type == "GET") return;
   if (s.data && s.data.match(new RegExp("\\b" + window._auth_token_name + "="))) return;
   if (s.data) {
  s.data = s.data + "&";
  } else {
   s.data = "";
   // if there was no data, $ didn't set the content-type
   xhr.setRequestHeader("Content-Type", s.contentType);
  }
  s.data = s.data + encodeURIComponent(window._auth_token_name) + "=" + encodeURIComponent(window._auth_token);
 });

In your application_controller.rb add this to ensure IE/SAFARI receive correct accept headers:

 def correct_safari_and_ie_accept_headers
    ajax_request_types = [ 'text/javascript', 'application/json', 'text/xml']
        request.accepts.sort!{ |x, y| ajax_request_types.include?(y.to_s) ? 1 : -1 } if request.xhr?
 end

This ensures that the accept header default to text/javascript, application/json or text/xml instead of the default text/html.

Now you can perform your regular AJAX calls. It will pass the auth token. Also make sure you include application.js only after the CDATA script tag as it requires the two global vars window._auth_token_name and window._auth_token.

Hope this helps! Cheers :)