TokenMismatch ONLY Certain Browsers - Laravel 5 Fresh/Production

Question

One example browser: IE 11: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko

Session started at 22:46:56. Fills out form. Submits form at 22:53:18, gets TokenMismatchException. So only 6 minutes later.

Session Started:

Apr 02 22:46:56 production.INFO: Session {"start":1428040016,"id":"8040cc779df0330855f8fa30483af63557aaf9c4","token":"L3nU4ehseV5w1iXy86g18FsgnVs6sAcDNjTUZ5QV","ip":"74.XX","method":"GET","url":"https://sub.domain.com/place-st","ua":"Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko"} []

User submits form 6 minutes later:

Apr 02 22:53:18 production.DEBUG: REQUEST SESSION token: 8L3pba9ALBVBcrvIPM5wnTl7bP0slSIrjCAkfWzh [] [] Apr 02 22:53:18 production.DEBUG: REQUEST INPUT _token: L3nU4ehseV5w1iXy86g18FsgnVs6sAcDNjTUZ5QV [] [] Apr 02 22:53:18 production.DEBUG: REQUEST HEADER X-CSRF-TOKEN: [] [] Apr 02 22:53:18 production.DEBUG: REQUEST HEADER X-XSRF-TOKEN: [] [] Apr 02 22:53:18 production.DEBUG: REQUEST URL: https://sub.domain.com/requests/post [] []

Server Vars:

Apr 02 22:53:18 production.DEBUG: array ( 'USER' => 'forge', 'HOME' => '/home/forge', 'FCGI_ROLE' => 'RESPONDER', 'APP_ENV' => 'production', 'QUERY_STRING' => '', 'REQUEST_METHOD' => 'POST', 'CONTENT_TYPE' => 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded', 'CONTENT_LENGTH' => '867', 'SCRIPT_FILENAME' => '/home/forge/doamin.com/public/index.php', 'SCRIPT_NAME' => '/index.php', 'REQUEST_URI' => '/requests/post', 'DOCUMENT_URI' => '/index.php', 'DOCUMENT_ROOT' => '/home/forge/doamin.com/public', 'SERVER_PROTOCOL' => 'HTTP/1.1', 'GATEWAY_INTERFACE' => 'CGI/1.1', 'SERVER_SOFTWARE' => 'nginx/1.6.2', 'REMOTE_ADDR' => '74.XX', 'REMOTE_PORT' => '56563', 'SERVER_ADDR' => '104.XX', 'SERVER_PORT' => '443', 'SERVER_NAME' => 'doamin.com', 'HTTPS' => 'on', 'REDIRECT_STATUS' => '200', 'HTTP_ACCEPT' => 'text/html, application/xhtml+xml, */*', 'HTTP_REFERER' => 'https://sub.domain.com/place-st', 'HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE' => 'en-US', 'HTTP_USER_AGENT' => 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko', 'HTTP_CONTENT_TYPE' => 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded', 'HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING' => 'gzip, deflate', 'HTTP_HOST' => 'sub.domain.com', 'HTTP_CONTENT_LENGTH' => '867', 'HTTP_CONNECTION' => 'Keep-Alive', 'HTTP_CACHE_CONTROL' => 'no-cache', 'PHP_SELF' => '/index.php', 'REQUEST_TIME_FLOAT' => 1428040398.7879851, 'REQUEST_TIME' => 1428040398, ) [] []

Session/Cookie

Apr 02 22:53:18 production.DEBUG: REQUEST PATH: requests/post [] [] Apr 02 22:53:18 production.DEBUG: COOKIE: array ( ) [] [] Apr 02 22:53:18 production.DEBUG: SESSION: array ( '_token' => '8L3pba9ALBVBcrvIPM5wnTl7bP0slSIrjCAkfWzh', ) [] []

HTTP Request:

Apr 02 22:53:18 production.DEBUG: POST /requests/post HTTP/1.1 Accept: text/html, application/xhtml+xml, */* Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate Accept-Language: en-US Cache-Control: no-cache Connection: Keep-Alive Content-Length: 867 Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded Host: sub.domain.com Referer: https://sub.domain.com/place-st User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko _token=L3nU4ehseV5w1iXy86g18FsgnVs6sAcDNjTUZ5QV&var=value&var2=value2&etc... [] []

Answer 1

This sounds alot like this known issue with Laravel: https://github.com/laravel/framework/issues/8172

The cause is not yet known, and it has been going on for a while. There are a lot of smart people looking into it - but the apparent randomness of the issue is making it difficult to debug.

I suggest you contribute your information to that ticket and keep an eye there for further information. Specifically we need as much information about your server config and app config as possible - so we can try to replicate the issue. So far the exact method to replicate is not known, making a fix difficult.