Preventing Cross-Site Request Forgery Attacks

D.

Cross-site request forgery (CSRF) is a type of web-based attack where an attacker exploits the trust of a user in a website and makes unauthorized requests to the website. The goal of the attack is to execute malicious actions on behalf of the user without their knowledge or consent. To prevent CSRF attacks, several secure coding techniques can be employed, including input validation, output encoding, parameterized queries, and tokenization.

Input validation is the process of checking the user input against expected and permissible values to prevent the injection of malicious data. It ensures that the user input does not contain any harmful or unexpected characters that can be used to execute attacks. Input validation can be applied to any data entered by a user, including form data, query parameters, cookies, and HTTP headers.

Output encoding is the process of converting special characters in user input to their corresponding HTML entity codes, which cannot be interpreted by the browser as code. This technique helps prevent XSS (cross-site scripting) attacks, which are often used in combination with CSRF attacks.

Parameterized queries are a technique used to prevent SQL injection attacks. A parameterized query uses placeholders for user input, which are then replaced with sanitized and validated data before being executed in the SQL query. This technique helps prevent the injection of malicious SQL code into the database.

Tokenization is a technique used to prevent CSRF attacks by generating a unique token for each user session. The token is embedded in the web page as a hidden form field or URL parameter and is validated with each subsequent request to ensure that the request is legitimate. If the token is not valid or missing, the request is rejected.

In conclusion, of the four options provided, the most effective secure coding technique to prevent CSRF attacks is tokenization. While input validation, output encoding, and parameterized queries are all important techniques in web application security, they are not specifically designed to prevent CSRF attacks.