Archive: Security

In the first part of this series we went over how a cookie works and what can be done to secure them. In this section we’re going to go over ways to add additional security to the session beyond the cookie itself.

By the end of this article we will written our own wrapper class for “session_start” that protects our session from a number of attacks while taking into account some of the unique challenges presented by modern ajax-heavy websites.

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Securing cookies and sessions is vital to keeping an application secure. Many tutorials have been written on the subject, but as the internet (and browsers loading it) evolve so do the methods you can use to keep your application secure.

In this article we’re going to break down the various components of a cookie and what they mean for security. This will include limiting the cookie to certain domains and paths on those domains, choosing what information to store, and protecting the cookie from cross site scripting exploits. In a second article we will go into more depth in how to protect everyone’s favorite cookie, the session ID.

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