I'm not sure whether this belongs on StackOverflow or on ServerFault, so I've picked SO for as first go.
A number of years ago, there was a highly visible discussion about mis-use of HTTP cookies, leading to various cookie filtering proxys and eventually to active cookie filtering in browsers like Firefox and Opera. Even now, Google will admit that currently about 7% of end-users will reject their tracking cookies, which is quite a lot, actually.
I still vett all cookies that get set in my browser. I have for years. I personally do not know anyone else who does this, but it has given me a few interesting insights into web tracking. For instance, there are many many more sites using Google Analytics than there were even two years ago. And there are still sites (extremely few, fortunately) which malfunction hideously if you don't let them set cookies. But advertisers in particular are still setting cookies to track your way across the web.
So is there much of an anti-cookie movement anymore? Has anyone tried to take Google to task for setting so many with Analytics? Is anyone trying to vilify sites like Ebay and PayPal who use a dodgy cross-site cookie to let you login?
Or am I making too much of a stupidly small problem?
Nowadays, there are other ways to block these annoyances. Rick752's EasyList has the EasyPrivacy list, which blocks most of them with no work at all other than adding the subscription once to Adblock Plus. NoScript can (with a little configuration, mostly removing some misguided entries on the default whitelist) easily block the ones which depend on JavaScript.
That said, I set up my browser to empty all the cookies on logout. Then they can track you only for the duration of a session, which will be short unless you tend to keep your browser open for a long time (or use the session save/restore all the time).
If you use Flash, know that it also has a kind of cookies, and the interface to manage them is most probably poorer than your browser's.
There's always people who misunsderstand cookies - on both sides. Ultimatey, it's up to the browsers to properly identify the sites for cookies. As long as the site's being set properly and the browser's respecting that, it's just not much of a problem. I think thta, with the increased use of web toolkits that take care of the programmatic details (and better, slightly more security-conscious browsers), it's not much of an issue now for end-users.
Beyond that, the proliferation of DHTML and XML-based partial-page-loading mechanisms (as well as database-backends and similar), the need to track session between stateless pages is reduced now. Your web app can very easily keep state without the need for cookies, and that may well have partially been driven by the number of [generally misinformed] end-users who blocked cookies all together.
In shorter words: "IMHO, no".
I gave up both as user and developer.
As a user the convenience of staying logged into sites is just too tempting, the pain of some sites not working too annoying. And I'm not that sensitive about my privacy, so I stopped caring and let all cookies through.
As a developer I always try to be as RESTful as possible, but I don't know any decent way of handling authentication without cookies. HTTP Basic Auth is just too broken, I can't assume HTTPS all the time and mangling URLs is painful and inelegant. What's left is form-based authentication with cookies. So my applications have one auth cookie -- I don't need any more than that, but that by itself requires the user to have cookies on if they want to authenticate themselves. Maybe OpenID and other federated identity services might fix that one day, but at the moment I can't rely on any of these yet.
My biggest annoyance with cookies is that I want to block Analytics cookies but at the same time I need to login to analytics to manage some customer sites. As far as I can tell they are the same cookie (in fact it may be the same cookie across all google services).
I really don't trust the Google cookie. They were apparently one of the first large companies to set cookie expiration to 2038 (the maximum) and their business model is almost entirely advertising based (targeted advertising at that). I suspect they know more about the day-to-day online activities and interests of people than any other government or organisation on the planet.
That's not to say it's all evil or anything but that really is a lot of trust to be given one entity. They may claim it's all anonymised but I'm pretty sure that claim would be hard to verify. At any rate there is no guarantee that this data won't be stolen, legally acquired or otherwise misused at some future point for other purposes.
It isn't impossible that one day this kind of profiling could be used to target people for more serious things than ads. How hard would it be for some future Hitler to establish the IP addresses, bank accounts, schools, employers, club memberships etc of some arbitary class of person for incarceration or worse?
So my answer is that this is not a small problem and history has already taught us many times over what can happen when you start classifying and tracking people. Cookies are not the only means but they are certainly a part of the problem and I recommend blocking them and clearing at every convenient opportunity.
I am also one of the hold-outs who doesn't automatically accept cookies. I do appreciate sites that need fewer, and I am more likely to return to those sites and allow cookies from them in the future.
That said, I do think that being vigilant about cookies is not (rationally) worth the effort. (In other words, I expect I will keep doing what I'm doing because it makes me feel better, even though I don't have evidence of commensurate tangible benefit.)
Every now and again I clear all my cookies. It's a pain as I then have to login to sites again (or set preferences) but this is also a good test as to whether either me or my browser can remember the login details..
Related
We have two separate websites on different domains and want to track whether a user is a visitor/member to one via a cookie , so we can use that to influence their experience on the other site. Currently, I have GTM setting a cookie based on whether the user has visited certain pages but I'm tracking the effectiveness of this with a combination of events in GTM and Google Analytics and there looks like a 10% error. I'm fairly new to both GA and GTM so it could be either errors on GTMs side or GAs side. I was wondering if anyone had any experience with setting cookies in GTM and if you think this is a safe way to set the cookie?
The reliability of a cookie set by GTM is not a question.
The real question here is how you conduct your analysis, plus how you expect the said cookies to work.
Cookies are useless across top-level domains for this purpose, so if the cookies are set on one domain, they won't be seen on the other.
You're supposed to reset the cookie on every pageview to not lose the context of the visit.
In case you're measuring your tracking effectiveness against the access log, you have to keep in mind that quite a lot of people use adblockers. 10% of data loss due to adblockers sounds reasonable to me, in case you have a younger or more technically apt audience.
You may skip on edge cases when people visit site A from a normal source, then go to site B, so you set the cookie, but then they go back to site A from site B, and so you reset the cookie again.
I would suggest solving this either with referrer report in GA, or by joining the GTM tracking across the sites via GTM cross-domain linking and then analyzing unbroken user sessions, paying attention to the hostname dimension, and then building your analysis on top of that. If you need to track users being logged in on other site, you can then use a custom dimension for that.
Less or more I am building my site heavly on sessions(especially for redirecting users etc), I am curious if this a dangerous practice. What would be the rough percentage of users who have disabled their cookie saving with their browsers ? I am open to any suggestions :)
Thanks
The main issue with sessions is not the disabled cookies. The main argument against sessions is that they make your app stateful. Stateless services have some advantages.
The related argument is performance: sessions are often the bottleneck for sites under high load, they make it harder to use caching and imply reading or writing to storage for each request.
It is fine to use sessions when they are needed but it is better to avoid them if you can.
I would venture that the percentage of users with disabled cookies is 0%. The vast majority of the general internet public don't fiddle with settings.
Even if they did: try turning off your cookies and visiting any popular site. You will be quickly and continually encouraged to turn your cookies back on :P
I've noticed that a lot of sites don't bother anymore with work-arounds so users who have turned their cookies off can still get the same experience on the site. Has that problem just gone away in modern web development? Have we gotten to a point where nobody does it, so we don't need to bother?
I think I put this in the same category as JavaScript. Most people will have cookies enabled, but there will be a few people who have them turned off. There isn't the scare like there was in the mid 90s about evil corporations tracking you all over the net etc. People have become more accepting about how the web works and what is required to have the convenience of web sites remembering who you are etc.
Some people still turn off cookies every once in a while. Usually because they wanted to test something and then forget to leave them off. Nowadays most web apps require cookies on so I think it's perfectly acceptable that instead of complex workarounds to provide the same user experience with or without cookies you can live with just a simple check and a message stating that without cookies the user won't be able to use the site.
There are lots of major websites that behave this way.
My 2c: cookies are good by default and Javascript is evil by default.
As to what general user sentiment is... I'd do cookie detection still so that you can display a meaningful error rather than simply not working if your users are blocking cookies for whatever reason. Don't bother trying to work around it though.
I'm going to guess that it'd be worthwhile running a test to see specifically if your visitors have cookies turned off, because different groups would have different issues. (if it's paranoia, security restrictions, etc.) A website catering to government employees might see higher percentages of cookie non-acceptance than other sites.
As some browsers (or plugins) allow customizing your acceptance of cookies by server or domain, it's possible that even two sites with identical user populations might have different levels of 'trust', if the users believe that one site seems shady.
A Note
I have a very good understanding of sessions and the theory of secure web-based authentication, etc., so please don't start with the basics, or give ambiguous answers. I am not looking for Best Practices, because I am aware of them. I am looking for the real risks behind them, that make the Best Practices what they are.
I have read, and agree with the principals that nothing more than a Session identifier should be stored in a Cookie at any given time.
The Story
However... I've inherited a rusty old app that stores the Username, Password, and an additional ID, in a Cookie, which is checked throughout the site as verification/authorization.
This site is always (can only be) accessed via HTTPS, and depending on your stance, is a "low-risk" website.
The application, in its current state, cannot be re-written in such a way as to handle Sessions - to properly implement such a thing would require, essentially, re-writing the entire application.
The Question
When suggesting to the-powers-that-be that storing their user's IDs/Passwords in plaintext, in a Cookie, is an extremely bad idea, what real risks are involved, considering the connection is always initiated and manipulated via HTTPS?
For example: is the only obvious way to compromise this information via Physical Access to the machine containing the Cookie? What other real risks exist?
HTTPS just protects against a man-in-the-middle attack by encrypting the data that goes across the wire. The information would still be in plain text on the client. So anything on the client's computer can go through that cookie information and extract the pertinent information.
Some other risks include cross-site scripting attacks which can enable cookie theft and who knows what kind of browser vulnerabilities which can enable cookie theft.
A given browser's "cookie jar" might not be stored securely, i.e., an attacker might be able to read it without physical access to the machine, over a LAN, or from a distributed filesystem (e.g., if the machine's storing user homes on a storage server, to allow for roaming), or via an application running on the machine.
Some browsers keep cookies in a file that can be displayed on the computer. IE6 comes to mind.
It seems to me that cookies are not all that restricted to a single site. Lots of advertising uses cookies across multiple sites. If I go to NextTag and look for a Nikon D700 camera then
I see NextTag advertisements on slashdot.org. This is an example of a cross-site cookie. Most users use the same password all over the web so if you store the password to one site and make it even a little easy to get to then malicious folks will sooner or later get to it.
To summarize this would be a very very very bad idea. On sites that I work on we don't save users passwords at all. We convert them to a hash key and save the hash key. That way we can validate the user but if we loose the content then there is no exposure of passwords. And this is on the server side, not the browser side!
Most cookies are limited time credentials. For example, session identifiers that expire after a couple hours or are forgotten when the browser windows. Even if the attacker gains access to the session cookie, they are guaranteed neither continued access to the account nor the ability to prevent the original account holder from logging in. Preventing long term account compromise is one of the reasons users are asked for their old password before being allowed to enter a new one.
A cookie containing a username and password, if disclosed, is much longer lived. Also, many users share their passwords between websites. As others have pointed out, the cookie could easily be disclosed via Cross-Site Scripting.
Finally, is the cookie marked with the "Secure" flag? If its not, an active network attack can easily force the browser to disclose it, even if HTTPS is used to serve the entire site.
People here already mentioned the "man in the middle" attack. The thing is that even with https it is still possible. There are different ways to do this - some of them relay on physical access to the network some of them do not.
The bottom line here is that even with https it is still possible for somebody to insert itself between your app and the browser. Everything will be passed through and will look from the browser exactly the same EXCEPT the server certificate. The intruder will have to send his own instead of the real one.
The browser will detect that there are problems with the certificate - usually it will either be issued to a different dns name or, more likely it will not be verified.
And here is the problem: how this violation is presented to the end user and how end user will react. In older versions of IE all indication of the problem was a small broken lock icon on the right side of the status bar - something which many people would not even notice.
How much risk this introduces depends on what is the environment and who (how trainable) the users are
Two two main vulnerabilities are cross site scripting attacks and someone accessing the user's machine.
Have you thought about just storing a password hash in the cookie instead of the raw password? It would require some coding changes but not nearly as many as swapping out your entire authentication system.
Why don't people use CFLOGIN? I remember having problem with it with CF7 some months ago, but I couldn't remember what was wrong with it.
I use cflogin all the time and it works great. It can be a little tricky to get working the way you like, but the benefits are huge. Being able to fine tune your application with user roles takes care of the bulk of my rights based customization. There used to be some issues with session management that made it difficult to work with. Turning on j2ee sessions seems to make most of those issues go away.
Some of the popular frameworks are not compatible with cflogin, so that might be one reason you don't see a lot of it. They tend to have their own approach to securing application features.
I think a lot of people get frustrated with it because it is a little quirky and they give up on it. Others have more complicated security needs that aren't addressed completely by cflogin, so they wind up writing their own system. Specifically, there isn't an easy way to deal with rights by content asset.
The only issue I've had is with roles in CF8. It's brilliantly implemented, and a little cruel that it doesn't work as it quite should. Maybe in CF9.
In any event, building your own roles based system (assign the user a session variable with a comma separated list of access levels that the system can check against) isn't too hard to do and I got over it.
The one nice thing about cfLogin that is probably still worth using is how it ties into the Server monitor to see how many people are logged in, etc.
The point above about using the jsession is true, it's worth doing in all cf apps. One of the best things I dragged myself through to get working how I wanted it.
CFLogin is not used for 3 reasons.
First, it's a little touchy, a little strange, and doesn't work how many would think. You put some code here, and if a user isn't logged in it runs it... that's just odd, you know? It didn't help that there were some bugs early on, either.
Second, while it has the basic required security features for a web application, it doesn't go any further. You can't really extend it easily. Who's to say that's how everybody wants it?
Third, and most realistically, it's because people have already solved that problem. The problem area of securing an application, authentication and authorization has been thought out in the community long enough and most people know how to just do it. CFLogin is reinventing the door. It is too little, too late.
Now, that's not to say that no one uses it. I personally have used it a few times with basic success, but no reason to ring a bell. For most of my applications, it makes more sense to not use CFLogin. The problem domains are this way or that, and CFLogin doesn't always solve it in the most intelligent way.
Do keep in mind that CFLOGIN has a catch with Basic HTTP Auth where it can continue to send its UserID and Password even after you have called CFLOGOUT.
I know this has driven some advanced users away from it.
Here is an excerpt from LiveDocs
Caution: If you use web server-based
authentication or any form
authentication that uses a Basic HTTP
Authorization header, the browser
continues to send the authentication
information to your application until
the user closes the browser, or in
some cases, all open browser windows.
As a result, after the user logs out
and your application uses the cflogout
tag, until the browser closes, the
cflogin structure in the cflogin tag
will contain the logged-out user's
UserID and password. If a user logs
out and does not close the browser,
another user might access pages with
the first user's login.
In my case (suppose for some other people too) the main reason is moving from other platform, say PHP. I mean that I've already got some knowledge and habits in ACL development and started using them in CF.
I know how to make it handy for user, flexible for developer and secure and don't really need to switch to cflogin.
Sometimes the same happens with other stuff, say in most cases I prefer to implement client-side validation using own JS instead of using cfform/cfinput.
Because it (still!) has serious bugs, like this one:
http://www.raymondcamden.com/index.cfm/2009/8/7/Watch-out-for-this-CFLOGIN-Bug