Cross-site request forgery (CSRF) is a web-based attack whereby HTTP requests are transmitted from a user that the web site trusts or has authenticated with(e.g. via HTTP redirects or HTML forms). Any site that uses cookie based authentication is vulnerable to these types of attacks. These attacks are mitigated by matching a state cookie against a posted form or query parameter.

The OAuth 2.0 login specification requires that a state cookie be used and matched against a transmitted state parameter. Keycloak fully implements this part of the specification so all logins are protected.

The Keycloak Admin Console is a pure JavaScript/HTML5 application that makes REST calls to the backend Keycloak admin REST API. These calls all require bearer token authentication and are made via JavaScript Ajax calls. CSRF does not apply here. The admin REST API can also be configured to validate the CORS origins as well.

The only part of Keycloak that really falls into CSRF is the user account management pages. To mitigate this Keycloak sets a state cookie and also embeds the value of this state cookie within hidden form fields or query parameters in action links. This query or form parameter is checked against the state cookie to verify that the call was made by the user.