SitePoint' PHPMaster.com has a new tutorial posted today from Martin Psinas about some tactics to prevent cross-site request forgeries from happening in your PHP application. The article introduces key concepts of CSRF and how you can keep it from happening in your code.

Cross-site request forgery (CSRF) is a common and serious exploit where a user is tricked into performing an action he didn’t explicitly intend to do. This can happen when, for example, the user is logged in to one of his favorite websites and proceeds to click a seemingly harmless link. In the background, his profile information is silently updated with an attacker’s e-mail address. [...] Any action that a user is allowed to perform while logged in to a website, an attacker can perform on his/her behalf, whether it’s updating a profile, adding items to a shopping cart, posting messages on a forum, or practically anything else.

He shows it to you "in action" with a PHP script for a basic login page that takes a username and password, does some filtering and sets the username to the session. Their "harmless.html" file offers a link to the site's "process" page with a logout action that would allow the "harmless" file access to the current session if clicked. To prevent this from happening, they suggest a unique token be included in interactions on your site. This key is checked against a token in the current session (or other location) and is only valid if they match.

The Symfony framework has included this as a part of their forms for a while now and includes automatic handling to check its validity. Solutions also exist for other frameworks like Zend Framework and many others.