This package contains utilities that can help to protect parts of Plone or applications build on top of the Plone framework.

If you only need to allow HTTP POST requests you can use the PostOnly checker:

from plone.protect import PostOnly
from plone.protect import protect

@protect(PostOnly)
def manage_doSomething(self, param, REQUEST=None):
    pass

This checker only operators on HTTP requests; other types of requests are not checked.

Simply:

from plone.protect import PostOnly

...
PostOnly(self.context.REQUEST)
...

A common problem in web applications is Cross Site Request Forgery or CSRF. This is an attack method in which an attacker tricks a browser to do a HTTP form submit to another site. To do this the attacker needs to know the exact form parameters. Form authentication is a method to make it impossible for an attacker to predict those parameters by adding an extra authenticator which can be verified.

To use the form authenticator you first need to insert it into your form. This can be done using a simple TAL statement inside your form:

<span tal:replace="structure context/@@authenticator/authenticator"/>

this will produce a HTML input element with the authentication information.

Next you need to add logic somewhere to verify the authenticator. This can be done using a call to the authenticator view. For example:

authenticator=getMultiAdapter((context, request), name=u"authenticator")
if not authenticator.verify():
    raise Unauthorized

You can do the same thing more conveniently using the protect decorator:

from plone.protect import CheckAuthenticator
from plone.protect import protect

@protect(CheckAuthenticator)
def manage_doSomething(self, param, REQUEST=None):
    pass

Or just:

from plone.protect import CheckAuthenticator

...
CheckAuthenticator(self.context.REQUEST)
...

You can also pass in the token by using the header X-CSRF-TOKEN. This can be useful for AJAX requests.

The most common way to use plone.protect is through the protect decorator. This decorator takes a list of checkers as parameters: each checker will check a specific security aspect of the request. For example:

from plone.protect import protect
from plone.protect import PostOnly

@protect(PostOnly)
def SensitiveMethod(self, REQUEST=None):
    # This is only allowed with HTTP POST requests.

This relies on the protected method having a parameter called REQUEST (case sensitive).

If you'd like use a different authentication token for different forms, you can provide an extra string to use with the token:

<tal:authenticator tal:define="authenticator context/@@authenticator">
  <span tal:replace="structure python: authenticator.authenticator('a-form-related-value')"/>
</tal:authenticator>

To verify:

authenticator=getMultiAdapter((context, request), name=u"authenticator")
if not authenticator.verify('a-form-related-value'):
    raise Unauthorized

With the decorator:

from plone.protect import CustomCheckAuthenticator
from plone.protect import protect

@protect(CustomCheckAuthenticator('a-form-related-value'))
def manage_doSomething(self, param, REQUEST=None):
    pass

Since version 3, plone.protect provides automatic CSRF protection. It does this by automatically including the auth token to all internal forms when the user requesting the page is logged in.

Additionally, whenever a particular request attempts to write to the ZODB, it'll check for the existence of a correct auth token.

Just add an interface to the current request object:

from plone.protect.interfaces import IDisableCSRFProtection
from zope.interface import alsoProvides
alsoProvides(request, IDisableCSRFProtection)

Warning! When you do this, the current request is susceptible to CSRF exploits so do any required CSRF protection manually.

plone.protect also provides, by default, clickjacking protection since version 3.0.

To protect against this attack, plone employs the use of the X-Frame-Options header. plone.protect will set the X-Frame-Options value to SAMEORIGIN.

To customize this value, you can either override it at your proxy server or you can set the environment variable of PLONE_X_FRAME_OPTIONS to whatever value you'd like plone.protect to set this to.

To disable all automatic CSRF protection, set the environment variable PLONE_CSRF_DISABLED value to true.

WARNING! It is very dangerous to do this. Do not do this unless the zeo client with this setting is not public and you know what you are doing.