OWASP Periodic Table of Vulnerabilities - Cookie Theft/Session Hijacking

Cookie Theft/Session Hijacking

Root Cause Summary

It's possible for an attacker to steal and abuse session identifiers when these are stored in cookies.

Browser / Standards Solution

None

Perimeter Solution

• Make sure that all session identifiers are transmitted over an encrypted protocol.
• Terminate/regenerate session if the session token is transmitted insecurely.
• Enforce the Secure and HttpOnly flags on cookies using a Web Application Firewall.

Complexity: Low
Impact: High

Generic Framework Solution

• force Secure and HttpOnly flags for all cookies.
• Make sure that the Domain and Path are set correctly
• Alert user and deauthorize oldest session when multiple simultaneous logins are detected.
• Terminate session if User-Agent string or other client fingerprinting changes.

Complexity: Medium
Impact: High

Custom Framework Solution

None

Custom Code Solution

None

References

Session Management Cheat Sheet (OWASP)