Implementation of packet sniffing and spoofing in software

Description

The goal of this lab environment is to familiarize with Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) attacks. In a CSRF attack, a victim user, a trusted website, and a malicious site are involved. The victim, who has an active session with a trusted site, visits a malicious site that then sends an unauthorized HTTP request to the trusted site within the victim's session, leading to potential harm.

Here we will carry out a CSRF attack on a social networking application called Elgg, which is an open-source platform pre-installed on our virtual machine. While Elgg includes built-in protections against CSRF, these defenses have been disabled for the purpose of this exercise. This session will cover the following topics:

• Cross-Site Request Forgery attack
• CSRF countermeasures: Secret token and Same-site cookie
• HTTP GET and POST requests
• JavaScript and Ajax

Languages and Utilities Used

• Python
• Ubuntu 20.04 VM
• Docker

Environments Used

• Windows 11 Home (21H2)

Program walk-through:

Task 1: Observing HTTP Request.
Task 2: CSRF Attack using GET Request.
Task 3: CSRF Attack using POST Request.
Task 4: Enabling Elgg’s Countermeasures