Security is one of the most important and most challenging tasks faced by an A laravel developer. It’s not that the developer is actually responsible for implementing the security layer—that is not the case at all—but it is very important for an laravel developer to understand the role that laravel plays in the overall security model of an application or website. Before you deploy your application in a hostile environment, full of merciless bots and malicious users, there are a number of security considerations that you must keep in mind. In this article, we are going to cover several common attack vectors for web applications and learn about how Laravel protects your application against them. Since a framework cannot protect you against everything, we will also look at the common pitfalls to avoid.
Cross-site request forgery
Cross-site request forgery (CSRF) attacks are conducted by targeting a URL that has side effects (that is, it is performing an action and not just displaying information). We have already partly mitigated CSRF attacks by avoiding the use of GET for routes that have permanent effects such as DELETE/cats/1, since it is not reachable from a simple link or embeddable in an <iframe> element. However, if an attacker is able to send his victim to a page that he controls, he can easily make the victim submit a form to the target domain. If the victim is already logged in on the target domain, the application would have no way of verifying the authenticity of the request.
The most efficient countermeasure is to issue a token whenever a form is displayed and then check that token when the form is submitted. Form::open and Form::model both automatically insert a hidden _token input element, and middleware is applied to check the supplied token on incoming requests to see whether it matches the expected value.
