One risk associated with the use of cookies is that a user’s cookies can be stolen by an attacker. If the session identifier is kept in a cookie, cookie disclosure is a serious risk, because it can lead to session hijacking.
Figure 4-2. PHP handles the complexity of session management for you
The two most common causes of cookie disclosure are browser vulnerabilities and cross-site scripting (discussed in Chapter 2). While no such browser vulnerabilities are known at this time, there have been a few in the past—the most notable ones are in Internet Explorer Versions 4.0, 5.0, 5.5, and 6.0 (corrective patches are available for each of these vulnerabilities).
While browser vulnerabilities are certainly not the fault of web developers, you may be able to take steps to mitigate the risk to your users. In some cases, you may be able to implement safeguards that practically eliminate the risk. At the very least, you can try to educate your users and direct them to a patch to fix the vulnerability.
For these reasons, it is good to be aware of new vulnerabilities. There are a few web sites and mailing lists that you can keep up with, and many services are beginning to offer RSS feeds, so that you can simply subscribe to the feed and be alerted to new vulnerabilities. SecurityFocus maintains a list of software vulnerabilities at http:// online.securityfocus.com/vulnerabilities, and you can filter these advisories by vendor, title, and version. The PHP Security Consortium also maintains summaries of the SecurityFocus newsletters at http://phpsec.org/projects/vulnerabilities/securityfocus.html.
Cross-site scripting is a more common approach used by attackers to steal cookies. An attacker can use several approaches, one of which is described in Chapter 2. Because client-side scripts have access to cookies, all an attacker must do is write a script that delivers this information. Creativity is the only limiting factor.
Protecting your users from cookie theft is therefore a combination of avoiding cross-site scripting vulnerabilities and detecting browsers with security vulnerabilities that can lead to cookie exposure. Because the latter is so uncommon (with any luck, these types of vulnerabilities will remain a rarity), it is not the primary concern but rather something to keep in mind.
Exposed Session Data
Session data often consists of personal information and other sensitive data. For this reason, the exposure of session data is a common concern. In general, the exposure is minimal, because the session data store resides in the server environment, whether in a database or the filesystem. Therefore, session data is not inherently subject to public exposure.
Enabling SSL is a particularly useful way to minimize the exposure of data being sent between the client and the server, and this is very important for applications that exchange sensitive data with the client. SSL provides a layer of security beneath HTTP, so that all data within HTTP requests and responses is protected.
If you are concerned about the security of the session data store itself, you can encrypt it so that session data cannot be read without the appropriate key. This is most easily achieved in PHP by using session_set_save_handler() and writing your own session storage and retrieval functions that encrypt session data being stored and decrypt session data being read. See Appendix C for more information about encrypting a session data store.
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