I have this weird problem in IE 9. I have a site which allows a user to login and can also be logged in by a separate website using web service in the background. When logged in, a cookie is created. In fiddler, I can see the user has logged in to my site from the third party website and the cookie is created. The third party site makes an ajax call and the cookie is created in my domain.
But when I click on a link to my site from the third party site, the login page is displayed again. I wrote a debug code that states in the page that the cookie does not exist but I can see in IE settings that the cookie does exist. The cookie expires in 24 hours.
How do I fix it? By the way, it works fine in most other browsers including IE8, IE7, Chrome.
This is similar to - IE9 Separate cookies for third party request - but there is no response there.
There is a limitation introduced in IE 9+. It isolates different zones to access each others' data. For example if a cookie is created in example.com for domain:example.com, a.example.com cannot access the cookie if their zones are different (one is intranet, one is trusted, etc.). You can check the zones in Internet Option -> Security tab.
For more information check Cookie Sharing in Cross-Zone Scenarios
Related
I have a django project serving two different purposes. On one subdomain, let's call it public.example.com, I allow unprivileged users to access a portal to edit their profile and settings.
On another domain, private.example.com, I give the user access to some management functions.
I have the default django session cookie settings, so when I log in to public.example.com and then try accessing private.example.com, I get redirected to a login page. This is normal and expected because the browser will not send the session cookie to any domain other than public.example.com.
If I copy the session cookie that is sent to public.example.com and tamper with the request made to private.example.com so that I send the public cookie to the private domain, django responds with a 200 OK answer and renders the page as if I am a user that has logged in to that domain.
I can not find any documentation that tells me that sessions are limited to the domains that they originated from, other than the default browser behaviour of limiting cookies to their respective domains.
Is it possible to prevent such unwanted access without serving the project on two different instances with two different databases?
I have a server side application that uses cookies for session management. The browser has some script that sends an ajax request to add information to the session. This is working well and in production.
The business wants to be able to insert this application in other companies' websites via iframes. ie myapp.com is in an iframe in otherbusiness.com and when the user clicks a button in the application in the iframe launched from myapp.com, it sends a request with a cookie that contains the session id to update the user's session on the myapp.com server.
For the browser to be able to send a cookie, 3rd party cookies needs to be enabled by setting the cookie options of SameSite=None and Secure. This works for all browsers except Safari.
Safari no longer accepts 3rd party cookies.
The only solution I can come up with is to use session ids in the URL but this is a little cumbersome.
Can anyone suggest a better option or perhaps a good implementation of session ids in the url?
I used hidden html fields to pass the session id and expiration.
My server side code checks for a cookie if it cannot find it, looks for the session id and expiration in the hidden fields.
This avoids security issues with passing the id in the url. It is a little clumsy to implement but it works.
i'm facing a few problems when i authenticate usign cookies to store the token, those cookies should be delivered between subdomains, for example, i have my auth code deployed in a subdomain named services.mydomain.co and my frontend in subdomain named apps.mydomain.co,
when someone authenticates, then my auth code creates a cookie with the tag Domain like this: Domain=.mydomain.co in order to enable it to be delivered between all subdomains of mydomain.co, but the cruel reallity is that it is not working, even the browser isn't storing the cookie.
the cookie it's successful delivered in response header after authenticate but the browser isn't storing it.
im creating the cookie this way:Set-Cookie: myKey=myKeyValue;path=/;httpOnly;Max-Age=1555520000;Domain=.mydomain.co;sameSite=none
hope someone could geve me an advice and sorry for bad english.
From your example, you are setting SameSite=None without Secure. This is invalid and browsers (Chrome, Edge, Firefox, etc.) will begin rejecting this.
However, you should check DevTools in Chrome on your site to see the specific error. You can check both the Console and individual requests in the Network tab to see issues with a given cookie.
You can find more detail on https://www.chromium.org/updates/same-site/test-debug
I created a Google site page with 5 links on it. Is it possible to create on my site a script or something that stores in a cookie the link on which the user has clicked, and then the next time he will connect to the page, he will be automatically redirected to the link he clicked on ? For information, the user connect to the site with his Google email account.
How can I do that please?
Thank you very much in advance for your help
While it is possible to read cookies and redirect using JavaScript inside a Google Page (using widgets), browsers will not allow you to set cookies for a completely different domain for obvious security reasons.
Related:
How to set a cookie for another domain
Cross-Domain Cookies
What's your favorite cross domain cookie sharing approach?
You could theoretically try and send an AJAX request from the Google Page with a "where should I direct this user to?" and expect a URL or a null.
See:
CORS $.ajax session cookies (access-control-allow-credentials & withCredentials=true)
Cross domain POST request is not sending cookie Ajax Jquery
But overall, your task is not as straightforward as it may seem. The browser will, fortunately, not play along.
I don't really understand when session is created and per what entity it is created (per ip, per browser, per logged in user). I see in documentation that sessions by default is created per visitor - but what is visitor (browser or ip)?
What are HTTP sessions?
To display a webpage your browser sends an HTTP request to the server, the server sends back an HTTP response. Each time you click a link on website a new HTTP transacation takes place, i.e. it is not a connection that is persistant over time (like a phone call). Your communication with a website consists of many monolitic HTTP transactions (tens or hundres of phonecalls, each phonecall being a few words).
So how can the server remember information about a user, for instance that a user is logged in (ip addresses are not reliable)? The first time you visit a website, the server creates a random string, and in the HTTP response it asks the browser to create a so called HTTP cookie with that value. A cookie is really just a name (of the cookie) and a value. If you go to a simple session-enabled Django site, the server will ask your browser to set a cookie named 'sessionid' with such a random generated value.
The subsequent times your browser will make HTTP requests to that domain, it will include the cookie in the HTTP request.
The server saves these session ids (for django the default is to save in the database) and it saves them together with so called session variables. So based on the session id sent along with an HTTP request it can dig out previously set session variables as well as modify or add session variables. If you delete your cookies (ctrl+shift+delete in Firefox), you will realize that no website remembers you anymore (Gmail, Facebook, Django sites, etc.) and you have to log in again. Most browsers will allow you to disable cookies in general or for specific sites (for privacy reasons) but this means that you can not log into those websites.
Per browser, per window, per tab, per ip?
It is not possible to log into different GMail accounts within the same browser, not even from different windows. But it is possible to log in to one account with Firefox and another with Chrome. So the answer is: per browser. However, it is not always that simple. You can use different profiles in Firefox, and each can keep different cookies and thus you can log into different accounts simultaneously. There are also Firefox plugins for keeping multiple sessions, e.g. MultiFox.
The session all depends on which session cookie your browser sends in it's HTTP request.
Play around
To get the full understanding of what is going on, I recommend installing the FireBug and FireCookie plugins for Firefox. The above screenshots are taken from FireBug's net panel. FireCookie will give you an overview of when and which cookies are set when you visit a site, and will let you regulate which cookies are allowed.
If there is a server side error, and you have DEBUG=True, then the Django error message will show you information about the HTTP request, including the cookies sent
It's browser (not IP). A session is basically data stored on your server that is identified by a session id sent as a cookie to the browser. The browser will send the cookie back containing the session id on all subsequent requests either until the browser is closed or the cookie expires (depending on the expires value that is sent with the cookie header, which you can control from Django with set_expiry).
The server can also expire sessions by basically ignoring the (unexpired) cookie that the browser sends and requiring a new session to be started.
There is a great description on how sessions work here.