Socket Hijacking

Unfortunately, cross-site request forgery attacks are not limited to the HTTP protocol. WebSocket hijacking (sometimes known as CSWSH) is a commonly overlooked vulnerability in most realtime applications. Fortunately, since Sails treats both HTTP and WebSocket requests as first-class citizens, its built-in CSRF protection and configurable CORS rulesets apply to both protocols.

You can prepare your Sails app against CSWSH attacks by enabling the built-in protection in config/csrf.js and ensuring that a _csrf token is sent with all relevant incoming socket requests. Additionally, if you’re planning on allowing sockets to connect to your Sails app cross-origin (i.e. from a different domain, subdomain, or port) you’ll want to configure your CORS settings accordingly. You can also define the authorization setting in config/sockets.js as a custom function which allows or denies the initial socket connection based on your needs.

Notes

• CSWSH prevention is only a concern in scenarios where people use the same client application to connect sockets to multiple web services (e.g. cookies in a browser like Google Chrome can be used to connect a socket to Chase.com from both Chase.com and Horrible-Hacker-Site.com.)