symfony/ux-live-component: CSRF Protection Bypass — Accept Header is CORS-Safelisted

Description

When using symfony/ux-live-component, methods annotated with #[LiveAction] are invokable from the browser and mutate server-side state via AJAX. Symfony\UX\LiveComponent\EventListener\LiveComponentSubscriber::isLiveComponentRequest() gated these invocations on the presence of Accept: application/vnd.live-component+html, with a code comment stating that this acted as a CSRF protection.

The Accept header is a CORS-safelisted request header, so a cross-origin fetch() can set it without triggering a preflight. The header therefore provided no CSRF protection. Any #[LiveAction] could be forged cross-origin against a victim's session.

In practice the attack is mitigated by SameSite=Lax session cookies (Symfony's default), but applications using SameSite=None, credentials: 'include' with a permissive cookie policy, or that have been pivoted from another same-origin vector remained exposed.

Resolution

isLiveComponentRequest() now additionally requires the request header X-Requested-With: XMLHttpRequest. This header is not CORS-safelisted, so the browser issues a preflight OPTIONS request for any cross-origin attempt; Symfony does not advertise CORS for LiveComponent endpoints, the preflight fails, and the real request is blocked before it reaches the application. The bundled Stimulus client already sends X-Requested-With on every LiveComponent request (RequestBuilder.ts), so standard usage is unaffected. Cross-origin callers must add X-Requested-With to their CORS Access-Control-Allow-Headers allow-list.

The patch for this issue is available here for branch 2.x (and forward-ported to 3.x).

Credits

Symfony would like to thank Anthropic (via Project Glasswing) for reporting the issue and Hugo Alliaume for providing the fix.