I think this is a great resource but wish it had not chosen a hybrid architecture. All the guides on decoupled Django seem to choose hybrid. It makes sense because you get the CSRF / XSS safety benefits but I'd love to see how others tackle a fully decoupled Django stack e.g. oAuth, JWTs and how they do their CSRF / XSS security. It's an area I need to learn more about.
Decoupled Django usually means that you are providing a client SPA with a API, such as a DRF powered REST API.
If you are using something like token auth (you mentioned JWT), then you are not using cookies, at which point CSRF is not needed. This is because the user's browser isn't automatically sending the cooking containing a session ID on every request to the server.
That said, you can implement session auth with DRF REST APIs, which accept a session cookie on requests. For this, I believe you would receive/send CSRF tokens via HTTP headers.
XSS is not something you would worry too much about in an API endpoint. It is something you should worry a lot about in your client side SPA though. If using something like React, your templates will be auto-escaped, and thus you have to go out of your way to make it a problem.
Where I get confused is storing the tokens securely. There's a lot of conflicting information online. I've come across many examples where they suggest localStorage which is a horrible idea.
A lot of the advice I see now is about http-only cookies but I think I'd probably look more into oAuth in the future.
The current best practice is to keep the token in memory only and store a refresh token in an HTTP-only cookie.
In my experience though, if you’re only doing web-based auth and don’t _need_ to use JWTs for a specific reason, just use regular session cookies, it’s way less hassle. Coordinating auth and refresh state across page refreshes and tabs is a pain, and using a refresh token means you’re using cookies and saved session state anyway, so you lose pretty much all of the unique benefits of using JWTs and still have all the downsides.
