Not to be That Guy 2.0; but doesn't all of this ad hoc hackery (CSRF tokens included, IMHO) around request authorisation and, if you'll permit me to extend the discussion a bit, also around request rate limiting, indicate that there might be something terribly broken at the heart of web requests?

In a same way that I feel the proliferation of front end frameworks indicates something is terribly broken at a cellular level about UI in HTML.

Might it not be time for a radical rethink? Can we not hope for a piercing, elegant solution?

You're wrong. If this is generated every time the page loads you get a new token each time. OR you have to transmit a god awful amount of data on the same page.

When I work for a company that accepts GBs of data over the same TLS connection on a single page, I'll worry about breach and only generating a CSRF token every time a page loads.

From the sample code provided I was assuming the value would not update on every request (since, if you were changing the expiration timestamp on every request you'd have a bit more work to do than you've shown here -- and either way the sample you've provided isn't a great way to generate the token).

I've generated this exact token at several companies and it's worked great.

An expiration of one day is not 86400 it's unix_time()+86400, to clarify. It's not stored in the users session and is completely stateless. It's great!

It has every property a csrf token needs

- per user

- not guessable or forgeable

- expires

Since it is stateless it doesn't require db lookups which can be an additional benefit. If you complain that it lacks the ability to be revoked I challenge you to find a single instance of people revoking csrf tokens.

You're wrong. If you MITM the connection you can block that response and the token will be user over and over again allowing these attacks