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).