Get Secured cookie from curl after authentication (c++) - c++

How to get secured cookie from curl after authentication?
curl_easy_getinfo(curl_handler, CURLINFO_COOKIELIST, &cookies);
fetched only one cookie, the other secured cookie wasnt fetched.
Same with
curl_easy_setopt(curl_handler, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, "cookie.txt");
However in java we could use cookie manager for login and after all the operations if we iterated the cookie manager there were two of them "Cookie" and "_WL_AUTHCOOKIE_JSESSIONID".
In curl i am not able to fetch "_WL_AUTHCOOKIE_JSESSIONID" .
Any help would be appreciated.

First, curl should get the same set of cookies that any other HTTP client gets.
Unfortunately, that is a should as servers sometimes act different depending on which client it thinks it speaks to and thus it may respond differently. Also, since you're comparing with another client it is possible that the java version you see did some more HTTP requests that made it get the second cookie your curl request doesn't.
To minimize the risk for all this, make sure the requests are as similar as possible so that the server cannot spot a difference between your clients and then it should repond identically and you will get the same set of cookies in both cases.
When the curl based client gets both cookies, you can extract them fine with CURLINFO_COOKIELIST just as you want.

Related

Set-Cookie from a server to an XHR client in a different domain, setting the domain to the client's domain, should it work?

tl;dr, an XHR client in domain A is sending a request to a server in domain B, server responds with a Set-Cookie with Domain=A (the client's domain, the XHR's Origin), all CORS headers set correctly, should it work?
It's well known that one can't set a cookie to another domain. ( How to set a cookie for another domain
However given the following scenario:
Actors:
Client in domain A, a web based client
Server in domain B, setup with CORS headers permitting A as origin, including Access-Control-Allow-Credentials set to true
Communication flow 1 (baseline):
Client is issuing a simple GET request to the Server
Server responds with a cookie, and sets the Domain property to be of the server (Domain=B)
Client is sending another HXR request and has withCredentials=true
The cookie is sent back to the server without any issues
Note: the cookie sent in step #1 is not showing in document.cookies, even if it was not set as httpOnly (since it doesn't
belong to the client's domain). Also attempts to get it from the xhr
via looking at the "Set-Cookie" header, you'll be blocked, by design:
https://fetch.spec.whatwg.org/#forbidden-response-header-name it will
even won't show in Chrome dev tools under the network tab! but it will
still be sent)
Communication flow 2 (my question):
Client is issuing a simple GET request to the Server
Server responds with a cookie, but sets the Domain property to be of the client (Domain=A)
Client is sending an HXR request and has withCredentials=true
The cookie is not sent back and doesn't seem to be stored anywhere
Why am I a bit surprised? Since the XHR origin is A and it requests something that sets the cookie to domain A (if I look in Postman I clearly see the Set-Cookie header being sent with Domain being the same as the request's Origin), and I have the most permissive CORS setting for that, what's the reasoning behind not letting me do it? (I was expecting it to fail, but still made me wonder)
Questions
Where is the best place in the spec/RFC that it clarifies that this won't work also for XHR where the cookie Domain equals the Origin
What is the attack vector in scenario 2 if theoretically the browser did allow the server to store the cookie if and only if the Origin is the same as the cookie Domain and the CORS origin allows that Origin.
Is there another way to make it work? Maybe it works but my POC was setup incorrectly?
Appendix: Reasoning
I'm looking for a way to have a cross origin CSRF using something like the Cookie to header token method, but due to the cross origin issue, it seems that it's impossible. The only workaround I thought of is sending the CSRF token as a header from the server, then the client can just save it as a cookie it can access later, is there any other way to do it? Is this considered secure?
A resource can only set cookies for its host's registrable domain. If Facebook were to use Google Fonts, and Google could use that to override Facebook cookies, that'd be pretty disastrous.
As for where this is defined, step 5 and 6 of https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6265#section-5.3 handle this. (Fetch largely defers to this RFC when it comes to interpreting the Set-Cookie header on responses.)

browser not sending cookie to server from local host while sending from another origin

I have an issue i don't understand.
I make an api call from a.b.com to a.b.com
In devtools I can see the request and I can see it contain cookie as expected.
Then I make the same api call from my local host to a.b.com and the cookie is not present.
As per my knowledge and online documentation search, cookie should be sent to server if it matches all its rules (domain, path, expires, etc.)
If so why the request is different for each origin?
We use CORS calls all the time.
In addition just to verify, I disabled Chrome 3rd party cookie protection.
Here is an image to provide more details:
Don't be shy to point me to good documentation on this matter :)
Due to security reasons you cannot share cookies between two different domains. You cannot exchange cookies between localhost and a.b.com.

Set-Cookie for a login system

I've run into a few problems with setting cookies, and based on the reading I've done, this should work, so I'm probably missing something important.
This situation:
Previously I received responses from my API and used JavaScript to save them as cookies, but then I found that using the set-cookie response header is more secure in a lot of situations.
I have 2 cookies: "nuser" (contains a username) and key (contains a session key). nuser shouldn't be httpOnly so that JavaScript can access it. Key should be httpOnly to prevent rogue scripts from stealing a user's session. Also, any request from the client to my API should contain the cookies.
The log-in request
Here's my current implementation: I make a request to my login api at localhost:8080/login/login (keep in mind that the web-client is hosted on localhost:80, but based on what I've read, port numbers shouldn't matter for cookies)
First the web-browser will make an OPTIONS request to confirm that all the headers are allowed. I've made sure that the server response includes access-control-allow-credentials to alert the browser that it's okay to store cookies.
Once it's received the OPTIONS request, the browser makes the actual POST request to the login API. It sends back the set-cookie header and everything looks good at this point.
The Problems
This set-up yields 2 problems. Firstly, though the nuser cookie is not httpOnly, I don't seem to be able to access it via JavaScript. I'm able to see nuser in my browser's cookie option menu, but document.cookie yeilds "".
Secondly, the browser seems to only place the Cookie request header in requests to the exact same API (the login API):
But, if I do a request to a different API that's still on my localhost server, the cookie header isn't present:
Oh, and this returns a 406 just because my server is currently configured to do that if the user isn't validated. I know that this should probably be 403, but the thing to focus on in this image is the fact that the "cookie" header isn't included among the request headers.
So, I've explained my implementation based on my current understanding of cookies, but I'm obviously missing something. Posting exactly what the request and response headers should look like for each task would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.
Okay, still not exactly what was causing the problem with this specific case, but I updated my localhost:80 server to accept api requests, then do a subsequent request to localhost:8080 to get the proper information. Because the set-cookie header is being set by localhost:80 (the client's origin), everything worked fine. From my reading before, I thought that ports didn't matter, but apparently they do.

question about cookie

I'm stuck in a cookie related question. I want to write a program that can automate download the attachments of this forum. So I should maintain the cookies this site send to me. When I send a GET request in my program to the login page, I got the cookie such as Set-Cookie: sso_sid=0589a967; domain=.it168.com in my program. Now if I use a cookie viewer such as cookie monster and send the same GET request, my program get the same result, but the cookie viewer shows that the site also send me two cookies which are:
testcookie http://get2know.it/myimages/2009-12-27_072438.jpg and token http://get2know.it/myimages/2009-12-27_072442.jpg
My question is: Where did the two cookie came from? Why they did not show in my program?
Thanks.
Your best bet to figure out screen-scraping problems like this one is to use Fiddler. Using Fiddler, you can compare exactly what is going over the wire in your app vs. when accessing the site from a browser. I suspect you'll see some difference between headers sent by your app vs. headers sent by the browser-- this will likley account for the difference you're seeing.
Next, you can do one of two things:
change your app to send exactly the headers that the browser does (and, if you do this, you should get exactly the response that a real browser gets).
using Fiddler's "request builder" feature, start removing headers one by one and re-issuing the request. At some point, you'll remove a header which makes the response not match the response you're looking for. That means that header is required. Continue for all other headers until you have a list of headers that are required by the site to yield the response you want.
Personally, I like option #2 since it requires a minimum amount of header-setting code, although it's harder initially to figure out which headers the site requires.
On your actual question of why you're seeing 2 cookies, only the diagnosis above will tell you for sure, but I suspect it may have to do with the mechanism that some sites use to detect clients who don't accept cookies. On the first request in a session, many sites will "probe" a client to see if the client accepts cookies. Typically they'll do this:
if the request doesn't have a cookie on it, the site will redirect the client to a special "cookie setting" URL.
The redirect response, in addition to having a Location: header which does the redirect, will also return a Set-Cookie header to set the cookie. The redirect will typically contain the original URL as a query string parameter.
The server-side handler for the "cookie setter" page will then look at the incoming cookie. If it's blank, this means that the user's browser is set to not accept cookies, and the site will typically redirect the user to a "sorry, you must use cookies to use this site" page.
If, however, there is a cookie header send to the "cookie setter" URL, then the client does in fact accept cookies, and the handler will simply redirect the client back to the original URL.
The original URL, once you move on to the next page, may add an additional cookie (e.g. for a login token).
Anyway, that's one way you could end up with two cookies. Only diagnosis with Fiddler (or a similar tool) will tell you for sure, though.

Does every web request send the browser cookies?

Does every web request send the browser's cookies?
I'm not talking page views, but a request for an image, .js file, etc.
Update
If a web page has 50 elements, that is 50 requests. Why would it send the SAME cookie(s) for each request, doesn't it cache or know it already has it?
Yes, as long as the URL requested is within the same domain and path defined in the cookie (and all of the other restrictions -- secure, httponly, not expired, etc) hold, then the cookie will be sent for every request.
As others have said, if the cookie's host, path, etc. restrictions are met, it'll be sent, 50 times.
But you also asked why: because cookies are an HTTP feature, and HTTP is stateless. HTTP is designed to work without the server storing any state between requests.
In fact, the server doesn't have a solid way of recognizing which user is sending a given request; there could be a thousand users behind a single web proxy (and thus IP address). If the cookies were not sent every request, the server would have no way to know which user is requesting whatever resource.
Finally, the browser has no clue if the server needs the cookies or not, it just knows the server instructed it to send the cookie for any request to foo.com, so it does so. Sometimes images need them (e.g., dynamically-generated per-user), sometimes not, but the browser can't tell.
Yes. Every request sends the cookies that belong to the same domain. They're not cached as HTTP is stateless, what means every request must be enough for the server to figure out what to do with it. Say you have images that are only accessible by certain users; you must send your auth cookie with every one of those 50 requests, so the server knows it's you and not someone else, or a guest, among the pool of requests it's getting.
Having said that, cookies might not be sent given other restrictions mentioned in the other responses, such as HTTPS setting, path or domain. Especially there, an important thing to notice: cookies are not shared between domains. That helps with reducing the size of HTTP calls for static files, such as the images and scripts you mentioned.
Example: you have 4 cookies at www.stackoverflow.com; if you make a request to www.stackoverflow.com/images/logo.png, all those 4 cookies will be sent.
However, if you request stackoverflow.com/images/logo.png (notice the subdomain change) or images.stackoverflow.com/logo.png, those 4 cookies won't be present - but maybe those related to these domains will.
You can read more about cookies and images requesting, for example, at this StackOverflow Blog Post.
No. Not every request sends the cookies. It depends on the cookie configuration and client-server connection.
For example, if your cookie's secure option is set to true then it must be transmitted over a secure HTTPS connection. Means when you see that website with HTTP protocol then these cookies won't be sent by browsers as the secure flag is true.
3 years have passed
There's another reason why a browser wouldn't send cookies. You can add a crossOrigin attribute to your <script> tag, and the value to "anonymous". This will prevent cookies to be sent to the destination server. 99.9% of the time, your javascripts are static files, and you don't generate that js code based on the request's cookies. If you have 1KB of cookies, and you have 200 resources on your page, then your user is uploading 200KB, and that might take some time on 3G and have zero effect on the result page. Visit HTML attribute: crossorigin for reference.
Cookie has a "path" property. If "path=/" , the answer is Yes.
I know this is an old thread. But I've just noticed that most browsers won't sent cookies for a domain if you add a trailing dot. For example http://example.com. won't receive cookies set for .example.com. Apache on the other hand treats them as the same host. I find this useful to make cross domain tracking more difficult for external resources I include, but you could also use it for performance reasons. Note this brakes validation of https certificates. I've run a few tests using browsershots and my own devices. The hack works on almost all browsers except for safari (mobile and desktop), which will include cookies in the request.
Short answer is Yes. The below lines are from the JS documentation
Cookies were once used for general client-side storage. While this was legitimate when they were the only way to store data on the client, it is now recommended to use modern storage APIs. Cookies are sent with every request, so they can worsen performance (especially for mobile data connections).