Dieter Stinglhamber has a new tutorial posted to his site showing you how to build a Laravel application that doesn't use cookies...well, any cookies that could be used for tracking.

Since May 25th you have been harassed by "We have updated our privacy policy" emails but also websites started to great you with "Please, let us and our 256 partners track you".

In response to these abusive practices, some developers have decided to follow a better path, removing every cookie that is not needed. For example, my website doesn't have a single cookie, Spatie new website won't have any either. [...] I encourage every developer to do the same and if you are using Laravel, here's how you can (very) easily get rid of the default cookies set by the framework.

He talks about the two cookies that are used by default in Laravel applications: the CSRF token and the session ID. He shares ways to remove each of these cookies (if you're not using them) and, for a final "trick", removing other cookie-related middleware from the "web" group that interact with cookies.

On the Laravel News site there's a new post sharing some of the new Blade directives coming in the 5.6 version of the Laravel framework.

Laravel 5.6 will include two new form blade directives for cross-site request forgery (CSRF) and HTTP method input, thanks to Taylor Otwell.

The new CSRF handling replaces the previously used format with a simple @csrf tag in the Blade template (inside of the form). The other is related to the method used to submit the form. The new addition allows you to submit the form via something other than POST using the method_field function.

In a post to his site Rob Allen shows you how to help secure your Slim 3-based applications with the help of the slim3-csrf package. A CSRF (cross-site request forgery) attack happens when another site requests a page in your application, possibly performing an action.

In addition to the core Slim framework, we also ship a number of add-ons that are useful for specific types of problems. One of these is Slim-Csrf which provides CSRF protection. This is middleware that sets a token in the session for every request that you can then set as an hidden input field on a form. When the form is submitted, the middleware checks that the value in the form field matches the value stored in the session. If they match, then the all is okay, but if they don't then an error is raised.

He shows how to add the middleware to your Slim 3 application and how to add the token to each form. The library generates random values for both the name of the token and the value making it compatible with applications that may involve multiple browser windows. He also shows you how to validate the token, either using the built-in "Guard" handling or manually by deferring the check to the route.

Jason Gilmore has posted an article to the Easy Laravel Book site with a bit more detail about how the framework prevents some common security issues including SQL injection and cross-site request forgery.

A reader recently e-mailed me and asked about Laravel 5’s native security features. While I talk about various security-related matters throughout the book, this information isn’t consolidated into any particular chapter and so I thought it would be useful to do so in a single blog post. Laravel helps to secure your web application by protecting against three serious security risks: SQL injection, cross-site request forgery, and cross-site scripting.

He goes through each of the types and talks about the built-in functionality Laravel includes to protect against each one. A bit of code is tossed in when needed to help clarify the point too. Fortunately for the user, a good bit of the technical pieces of these protections are behind the scenes and don't need much effort to use.

Barry vd. Heuvel has a recent post to his site explaining how the Laravel framework has implemented CSRF protection natively. CSRF is short for Cross-site request forgery and is a type of security vulnerability.

In this blog we take a closer look into CSRF protection in Laravel. We compare the difference between the CSRF filter in Laravel 4 and the current VerifyCsrfToken middleware in Laravel 5.

He start with a quick look at why CSRF protection is even needed and what kind of problems it can cause. He shows how the CSRF protection was enabled in the Laravel 4 routing and how, in Laravel 5, the token evaluation was updated to use the hash_equals to prevent timing attacks. He then gets into the details of the middleware and how it handles the protection for you (including detection and use of the X-CSRF-TOKEN header).

In this new post to his site, Pádraic Brady looks at two methods for generating CSRF (cross-site request forgery) tokens to help protect your application. It's not a tutorial, per se...more of a comparison of two methods: stateful and stateless CSRF tokens.

The difference between Stateful and Stateless CSRF defences is that the former requires storing the CSRF token on the server (i.e. session data) while the latter does not, i.e. the server has zero record of any CSRF tokens. As far as the server is concerned, the number of parties with persistent knowledge of a valid token is reduced to just one – the client. [...] Let’s compare both types of CSRF protections.

He introduces the concepts behind both types of token generation, pointing out that most of the PHP frameworks out there rely on the stateful option (the "synchronizer" method). The other method ("double submit") actually involves two tokens, one in the POST content and the other as a cookie value. He also dissects this other stateless concept article he found and how its method of generation may not be ideal.

Like most attacks, CSRF does not exist in isolation so developing a good defence requires mitigating other attacks. [...] Any good CSRF token implementation, whether stateful or stateless, should reflect those requirements with features for limiting tokens by scope and time.

Joseph Scott has a recent post to his site looking at the idea of stateless CSRF tokens and how to create them while avoiding the typical "store them in a session" mentality.

This is all fine and good until you want to avoid using PHP sessions. Perhaps you have several web servers and don’t want to deal with shared session storage. Or have servers in multiple data centers and don’t want to try and sync state across them. What ever the reason, popping a token into $_SESSION isn’t an option in this case. In short you want some sort of stateless CSRF token.

He looks at two methods to help get around this issue. The first method is based on known values that won't change very frequently (say, maybe 24 hours). His second method, however, has a bit more strength to it. His idea uses a combination of a key, the current time, a timeout and a known string of data - all base64 encoded.

Anthony Ferrara has written up a new post to his site looking at efective use of CSRF tokens and a few different strategies for generating them.

There's been a bit of noise in the past week about the proper way to prevent Cross-Site-Request-Forgery (CSRF) attacks. It seemed to have started with this post. There's been discussion in the comments, and on Twitter about it, and there seems to be several opposing viewpoints on the matter. I want to start off by saying that I agree completely with the post in question. But I figured I'd write a post to explain WHY I agree with it.

He starts with an overview of a few of the common types of request forgery including from a javascript injection, a Man-in-the-Middle attack and a replay attack. He then breaks up the "lines of defense" part of the post into three different sections - adding a hidden token field to forms, changing the token for each request and using random numbers when regenrating them.

In this new post to his site Kevin Schroeder has a new post with his take on generating more secure CSRF tokens for use in your site.

In researching the second edition for the IBM i Programmer’s Guide to PHP Jeff and I decided to include a chapter on security since we really didn’t talk much about it in the first edition. I’m talking about cross site request forgeries right now and I wanted to make sure that what I was going to suggest would not break the internet in some way. I did some Google searching to see what other people were recommending.

Most of the examples he saw used md5, uniqid and rand to create a randomized hash. He suggests an alternative - a method using the hash_hmac and openssl_random_pseudo_bytes methods to generate a sha256 hash for use in your page's submissions.

PHPMaster.com has posted a new article with some high level security tips and reminders for PHP developers when wanting to help prevent issues with their applications. The article provides eight tips, each with a brief description.

When it comes to application security, in addition to securing your hardware and platform, you also need to write your code securely. This article will explain how to keep your application secure and less vulnerable to hacking.

The good practices they recommend include input data validation, protecting against XSS attacks, preventing SQL injections, protecting session data, proper error handling and protecting included files. There's some good reminders here, but it barely scratches the surface of effectively protecting your application. These tips are the "low hanging fruit" for securing your app, so be aware that there's more things to worry about than just these eight.