I can see that HttpOnly cookies are good for security, however they make logging out without server interaction impossible, right?1 So when the network fails, you can't log out and leave. I can imagine a workaround, but I'd like to ask first
does it make sense to handle this case
are there any standard solutions for this?
1 Assuming you're actually using them.
If by logging out you mean removing the session cookie, then no, you cannot remove HttpOnly cookies from Javascript. It is, however, easy to set up two cookies, one HttpOnly and one insecure, such that only a combination of the two is a valid session key. Removing either cookie would destroy the session.
If your service is sensitive, it does make sense to handle all realistic threat scenarios, and this one is pretty realistic.
Setting up two cookies, one of which is HttpOnly, is actually common in the standard CSRF prevention technique. I have not seen it in your specific scenario but it very similar to the anti-CSRF case, and looks like an obvious and easy application of the general twoo-cookies idea.
Related
I've just noticed my console is littered with this warning, appearing for every single linked resource. This includes all referenced CSS files, javascript files, SVG images, and even URLs from ajax calls (which respond in JSON). But not images.
The warning, for example in case of a style.css file, will say:
Cookie “PHPSESSID” will be soon treated as cross-site cookie against “http://localhost/style.css” because the scheme does not match.
But, the scheme doesn't match what? The document? Because that it does.
The URL of my site is http://localhost/.
The site and its resources are all on http (no https on localhost)
The domain name is definitely not different because everything is referenced relative to the domain name (meaning the filepaths start with a slash href="/style.css")
The Network inspector just reports a green 200 OK response, showing everything as normal.
It's only Mozilla Firefox that is complaining about this. Chromium seems to not be concerned by anything. I don't have any browser add-ons. The warnings seem to originate from the browser, and each warning links to view the corresponding file source in Debugger.
Why is this appearing?
that was exactly same happening with me. the issue was that, firefox keeps me showing even Cookies of different websites hosted on same URL : "localhost:Port number" stored inside browser memory.
In my case, i have two projects configured to run at http://localhost:62601, when i run first project, it saves that cookie in browser memory. when i run second project having same URL, Cookie is available inside that projects console also.
what you can do, is delete the all of the cookies from browser.
#Paramjot Singh's answer is correct and got me most of the way to where I needed to be. I also wasted a lot of time staring at those warnings.
But to clarify a little, you don't have to delete ALL of your cookies to resolve this. In Firefox, you can delete individual site cookies, which will keep your settings on other sites.
To do so, click the hamburger menu in the top right, then, Options->Privacy & Security or Settings->Privacy & Security
From here, scroll down about half-way and find Cookies and Site Data. Don't click Clear Data. Instead, click Manage Data. Then, search for the site you are having the notices on, highlight it, and Remove Selected
Simple, I know, but I made the mistake of clearing everything the first time - maybe this will prevent someone from doing same.
The warning is given because, according to MDN web docs:
Standards related to the Cookie SameSite attribute recently changed such that:
The cookie-sending behaviour if SameSite is not specified is SameSite=Lax. Previously the default was that cookies were sent for all requests.
Cookies with SameSite=None must now also specify the Secure attribute (they require a secure context/HTTPS).
Which indicates that a secure context/HTTPS is required in order to allow cross site cookies by setting SameSite=None Secure for the cookie.
According to Mozilla, you should explicitly communicate the intended SameSite policy for your cookie (rather than relying on browsers to apply SameSite=Lax automatically), otherwise you might get a warning like this:
Cookie “myCookie” has “SameSite” policy set to “Lax” because it is missing a “SameSite” attribute, and “SameSite=Lax” is the default value for this attribute.
The suggestion to simply delete localhost cookies is not actually solving the problem. The solution is to properly set the SameSite attribute of cookies being set by the server and use HTTPS if needed.
Firefox is not the only browser making these changes. Apparently the version of Chrome I am using (84.0.4147.125) has already implemented the changes as I got this message in the console:
The previously mentioned MDN article and this article by Mike Conca have great information about changes to SameSite cookie behavior.
Guess you are using WAMP or LAMP etc. The first thing you need to do is enable ssl on WAMP as you will find many references saying you need to adjust the cookie settings to SameSite=None; Secure That entails your local connection being secure. There are instructions on this link https://articlebin.michaelmilette.com/how-to-add-ssl-https-to-wampserver/ as well as some YouTube vids.
The important thing to note is that when creating the SSL certificate you should use sha256 encoding as sha1 is now deprecated and will throw another warning.
There is a good explanation of SameSite cookies on https://web.dev/samesite-cookies-explained/
I was struggling with the same issue and solved it by making sure the Apache 2.4 headers module was enabled and than added one line of code
Header always edit Set-Cookie ^(.")$ $1;HttpOnly;Secure
I wasted lots of time staring at the same sets of warnings in the Inspector until it dawned on me that the cookies were persisting and needed purging.
Apparently Chrome was going to introduce the new rules by now but Covid-19 meant a lot of websites might have been broken while people worked from home. The major browsers are working together on the SameSite attribute this so it will be in force soon.
I have very strange problem - CSRF cookie not set on some of clients browsers. What could it potentially be?
All needed middleware is enabled, and as I said above, problem appears only on very small count of machines, although another Django-powered sites work well there.
The problem didn't solved in usual way, so I refused from cookie-based CSRF-protection and get session-based instead: https://github.com/mozilla/django-session-csrf.
Is there a way to get a list of all the cookies set by a website using WatiN?
The IE Browser class in WatiN provides a GetCookie method that allows you to retrieve a specific cookie, but I would like to iterate over all the cookies that have been set.
There are two methods that should allow you to get the cookies:
CookieCollection cookies = _browser.GetCookiesForUrl(new Uri(url));
and
CookieContainer cookies = _browser.GetCookieContainerForUrl(new Uri(url));
But both of these are empty. Also calling the GetCookie method for a specific cookie returns null.
Any suggestions of how to get this to work?
Recently I had to deal with this situation. At first I thought the cookies I was looking for were HttpOnly, but I took a look using WireShark and there was no HttpOnly flag.
Not sure why GetCookieContainerForUrl fails in this case, but a client side script call revealed the cookies were still there:
ie.Eval("document.cookie");
You might want to try that statement before resorting to packet sniffing every time.
Well, I suppose those methods should work as expected, but maybe you are trying to get HttpOnly cookies? Many sites/web frameworks sets this flag for important cookies, especially when it comes to "session id" cookies. You can't read them in WatiN and it's really hard to read them at all. I was looking for solution once and only one I got was article: Retrieve HttpOnly Session Cookie in WebBrowser
If you want to know if the site you are trying to get cookies is setting HttpOnly flag on the cookie, use Fiddler2 and look in response headers.
Searching for possible ways to get cookie with httpOnly enabled, I cannot find any. But then again, how do browser addons like Firebug, Add 'N Edit Cookie, etc. can get the cookies? Can't an attacker do the same?
So my question is, is it really, really impossible to get cookie of httpOnly enabled requests, using javascript?
p/s: Yes I'm aware httpOnly doesn't stop XSS attacks. I'm also aware it's futile against sniffers. Let's just focus on javascript, sort of alert(document.cookie) type / pre httpOnly era.
how do browser addons like Firebug,
Add 'N Edit Cookie, etc. can get the
cookies?
They are browser extensions, and the browser has access to the cookies ; extensions have a higher level of privileges than you JS code.
is it really, really impossible to get
cookie of httpOnly enabled requests,
using javascript?
Provided you are using a browser (ie, a quite recent browser) that support httpOnly and doesn't have a security bug about it, it should be impossible -- that's the goal of httpOnly.
Quoting wikipedia :
When the browser receives such a
cookie, it is supposed to use it as
usual in the following HTTP exchanges,
but not to make it visible to
client-side scripts.
Firebug and other addons can do that because they are not running under security restrictions imposed to the JavaScripts of the web pages.
Is there a standard technique for an ASP.NET application to check if a client's browser
enables/supports cookies?
I'd appreciate any solution - even a less common one, as long as it's elegant enough.
10x!
Well, the only way to check it is to try to set a cookie, then in the next request check if the browser sent it back.