httpstate Working GroupA. Barth
Internet-DraftU.C. Berkeley
Obsoletes: 2109 (if approved)February 12, 2010
Intended status: Standards Track
Expires: August 16, 2010

HTTP State Management Mechanism

Abstract

This document defines the HTTP Cookie and Set-Cookie headers. These headers can be used by HTTP servers to store state on HTTP user agents, letting the servers maintain a stateful session over the mostly stateless HTTP protocol. The cookie protocol has many historical infelicities and should be avoided for new applications of HTTP.

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1. Introduction

This document defines the HTTP Cookie and Set-Cookie header. Using the Set-Cookie header, an HTTP server can store name/value pairs and associated metadata (called cookies) at the user agent. When the user agent makes subsequent requests to the server, the user agent uses the metadata to determine whether to return the name/value pairs in the Cookie header.

Although simple on its surface, the cookie protocol has a number of complexities. For example, the server indicates a scope for each cookie when sending them to the user agent. The scope indicates the maximum amount of time the user agent should retain the cookie, to which servers the user agent should return the cookie, and for which protocols the cookie is applicable.

For historical reasons, the cookie protocol contains a number of security and privacy infelicities. For example, a server can indicate that a given cookie is intended for "secure" connections, but the Secure attribute provides only confidentiality (not integrity) from active network attackers. Similarly, cookies for a given host are shared across all the ports on that host, even though the usual "same-origin policy" used by web browsers isolates content retrieved from different ports.


2. General Nonsense

2.1. Conformance Criteria

The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in document are to be interpreted as described in [RFC2119].

Requirements phrased in the imperative as part of algorithms (such as "strip any leading space characters" or "return false and abort these steps") are to be interpreted with the meaning of the key word ("MUST", "SHOULD", "MAY", etc) used in introducing the algorithm.

2.2. Syntax Notation

This specification uses the Augmented Backus-Naur Form (ABNF) notation of [RFC5234].

The following core rules are included by reference, as defined in [RFC5234], Appendix B.1: ALPHA (letters), CR (carriage return), CRLF (CR LF), CTL (controls), DIGIT (decimal 0-9), DQUOTE (double quote), HEXDIG (hexadecimal 0-9/A-F/a-f), LF (line feed), OCTET (any 8-bit sequence of data), SP (space), HTAB (horizontal tab), VCHAR (any visible [USASCII] character), and WSP (whitespace).

2.3. Terminology

The terms user agent, client, server, proxy, and origin server have the same meaning as in the HTTP/1.1 specification.

The terms request-host and request-URI refer to the values the user agent would send to the server as, respectively, the host (but not port) and abs_path portions of the absoluteURI (http_URL) of the HTTP Request-Line.


3. Overview

We outline here a way for an origin server to send state information to a user agent, and for the user agent to return the state information to the origin server.

To initiate a session, the origin server includes a Set-Cookie header in an HTTP response. (Note that "session" here does not refer to a persistent network connection but to a logical session created from HTTP requests and responses. The presence or absence of a persistent connection should have no effect on the use of cookie-derived sessions).

The user agent returns a Cookie request header to the origin server if it chooses to continue a session. The Cookie header contains a number of cookies the user agent received in previous Set-Cookie headers. The origin server MAY ignore the Cookie header or use the header to determine the current state of the session. The origin server MAY send the user agent a Set-Cookie response header with the same or different information, or it MAY send no Set-Cookie header at all.

Servers MAY return a Set-Cookie response header with any response. User agents SHOULD send a Cookie request header, subject to other rules detailed below, with every request.

An origin server MAY include multiple Set-Cookie header fields in a single response. Note that an intervening gateway MUST NOT fold multiple Set-Cookie header fields into a single header field.

3.1. Examples

[TODO: Put some examples here.


4. A Well-Behaved Profile

This section describes the syntax and semantics of a well-behaved profile of the protocol. Servers SHOULD use the profile described in this section, both to maximize interoperability with existing user agents and because a future version of the cookie protocol could remove support for some of the most esoteric aspects of the protocol. User agents, however, MUST implement the full protocol to ensure interoperability with servers making use of the full protocol.



6. Implementation Considerations

6.1. Limits

Practical user agent implementations have limits on the number and size of cookies that they can store. General-use user agents SHOULD provide each of the following minimum capabilities:

  • At least 4096 bytes per cookie (as measured by the sum of the length of the cookie's name, value, and attributes).
  • At least 50 cookies per domain.
  • At least 3000 cookies total.

Servers SHOULD use as few and as small cookies as possible to avoid reaching these implementation limits and to avoid network latency due to the Cookie header being included in every request.

Servers should gracefully degrade if the user agent fails to return one or more cookies in the Cookie header because the user agent might evict any cookie at any time on orders from the user.

6.2. Application Programmer Interfaces

One reason the cookie protocol uses such an esoteric syntax is because many platforms (both in servers and user agents) provide string-based application programmer interfaces (APIs), requiring application-layer programmers to generate and parse the syntax used by the cookie protocol.

Instead of providing string-based APIs to the cookie protocols, implementations would be well-served by providing more semantic APIs. It is beyond the scope of this document to recommend specific API designs, but there are clear benefits to accepting a abstract "Date" object instead of a serialized date string.


7. Security Considerations

7.1. General Recommendations

The cookie protocol is NOT RECOMMENDED for new applications.

For applications that do use the cookie protocol, servers SHOULD NOT rely upon cookies for security.

For servers that do use cookies for security, servers SHOULD use a redundant form of authentication, such as HTTP authentication or TLS client certificates.

7.2. Ambient Authority

A server that uses cookies to authenticate users can suffer security vulnerabilities because some user agents let remote parties issue HTTP requests from the user agent (e.g., via HTTP redirects and HTML forms). When issuing those requests, user agent attaches cookies even if the entity does not know the contents of the cookies, possibly letting the remote entity exercise authority at an unwary server. User agents can mitigate this issue to some degree by providing APIs for suppressing the Cookie header on outgoing requests.

Although this security concern goes by a number of names (e.g., cross-site scripting and cross-site request forgery), the issue stems from cookies being a form of ambient authority. Cookies encourage server operators to separate designation (in the form of URLs) from authorization (in the form of cookies). Disentangling designation and authorization can cause the server and its clients to become confused deputies and undertake undesirable actions.

Instead of using cookies for authorization, server operators might wish to consider entangling designation and authorization by treating URLs as object-capabilities. Instead of storing secrets in cookies, this approach stores secrets in URLs, requiring the remote entity to supply the secret itself. ALthough this approach is not a panacea, judicious use of these principles can lead to more robust security.

7.3. Clear Text

Unless sent over a secure channel (such as TLS), the information in the Set-Cookie and Cookie headers is transmitted in the clear.

  1. All sensitive information conveyed in these headers is exposed to an eavesdropper.
  2. A malicious intermediary could alter the headers as they travel in either direction, with unpredictable results.
  3. A malicious client could alter the Cookie header before transmission, with unpredictable results.

Servers SHOULD encrypt and sign their cookies when transmitting them to the user agent (even when sending the cookies over a secure channel). However, encrypting and signing cookies does not prevent an attacker from transplanting a cookie from one user agent to another.

In addition to encrypting and signing the contents of every cookie, servers that require a higher level of security SHOULD use the cookie protocol only over a secure channel.

7.4. Weak Confidentiality

Cookies do not provide isolation by port. If a cookie is readable by a service running on one port, the cookie is also readable by a service running on another port of the same server. If a cookie is writable by a service on one port, the cookie is also writable by a service running on another port of the same server. For this reason, servers SHOULD NOT both run mutually distrusting services on different ports of the same host and use cookies to store security-sensitive information.

Cookies do not provide isolation by scheme. Although most commonly used with the http and https schemes, the cookies for a given host are also available to other schemes, such as ftp and gopher. This lack of isolation is most easily seen when a user agent retrieves a URI with a gopher scheme via HTTP, but the lack of isolation by scheme is also apparent via non-HTTP APIs that permit access to cookies, such as HTML's document.cookie API.

7.5. Weak Integrity

Cookies do not provide integrity guarantees for sibling domains (and their subdomains). For example, consider foo.example.com and bar.example.com. The foo.example.com server can set a cookie with a Domain attribute of ".example.com", and the user agent will include that cookie in HTTP requests to bar.example.com. In the worst case, bar.example.com will be unable to distinguish this cookie from a cookie it set itself. The foo.example.com server might be able to leverage this ability to mount an attack against bar.example.com.

Similarly, an active network attacker can inject cookies into the Cookie header sent to https://example.com/ by impersonating a response from http://example.com/ and injecting a Set-Cookie header. The HTTPS server at example.com will be unable to distinguish these cookies from cookies that it set itself in an HTTPS response. An active network attacker might be able to leverage this ability to mount an attack against example.com even if example.com uses HTTPS exclusively.

Servers can partially mitigate these attacks by encrypting and signing their cookies. However, using cryptography does not mitigate the issue completely because an attacker can replay a cookie he or she received from the authentic example.com server in the user's session, with unpredictable results.

7.6. Reliance on DNS

The cookie protocol relies upon the Domain Name System (DNS) for security. If the DNS is partially or fully compromised, the cookie protocol might fail to provide the security properties required by applications.

8. Normative References

[RFC2119]
Bradner, S., “Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Levels”, BCP 14, RFC 2119, March 1997.
[RFC2616]
Fielding, R., Gettys, J., Mogul, J., Frystyk, H., Masinter, L., Leach, P., and T. Berners-Lee, “Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1”, RFC 2616, June 1999.
[RFC5234]
Crocker, D., Ed. and P. Overell, “Augmented BNF for Syntax Specifications: ABNF”, STD 68, RFC 5234, January 2008.
[RFC5246]
Dierks, T. and E. Rescorla, “The Transport Layer Security (TLS) Protocol Version 1.2”, RFC 5246, August 2008.

Appendix A. Acknowledgements

This document borrows heavily from RFC 2109. [TODO: Figure out the proper way to credit the authors of RFC 2109.]


Author's Address

Adam Barth
University of California, Berkeley
EMail: abarth@eecs.berkeley.edu
URI: http://www.adambarth.com/