How has support for securing web apps (CSRF, XSS) changed across recent Perl versions?

Over recent Perl versions, the community has made significant strides in improving the security of web applications, particularly against vulnerabilities like Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) and Cross-Site Scripting (XSS). Key modules and best practices have emerged to help developers secure their applications effectively.

CSRF Protection

With the release of more modern frameworks like Mojolicious and Catalyst, built-in mechanisms are available to automatically handle CSRF tokens. This has greatly simplified protecting web applications from CSRF attacks.

XSS Protection

Perl has also evolved to offer better tools for escaping and validating user input, which is essential for defending against XSS attacks. Modules such as HTML::Escape and HTML::Template are widely used to ensure outputs are properly sanitized.

Example of CSRF Token Implementation

# Example using CGI::Simple for CSRF protection use CGI::Simple; use Digest::SHA qw(sha256_hex); my $cgi = CGI::Simple->new; # Generate CSRF token my $csrf_token = sha256_hex(time . $$); $cgi->cookie(-name=>'csrf_token', -value=>$csrf_token); # On form submission, verify token if ($cgi->param('csrf_token') eq $csrf_token) { # Process form safely } else { die "Invalid CSRF token!"; }

Perl Web Applications CSRF XSS Security Modules Mojolicious Catalyst HTML::Escape HTML::Template