full-disclosure - Re: [Ruby on Rails] Move away from CookieStore if you care about your users and their security. Here is a technical explanation why.

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Date: Wed, 25 Sep 2013 06:36:10 -0700
From: Tim <tim-security@...tinelchicken.org>
To: "G. S. McNamara" <main@...cnamara.com>
Cc: full-disclosure@...ts.grok.org.uk
Subject: Re: [Ruby on Rails] Move away from CookieStore if
 you care about your users and their security. Here is a technical
 explanation why.

> The fix is to configure your Rails app to store most session information on
> the server side in the database. Move away from the default CookieStore,
> which stores the entire session hash in the cookie, to something like
> ActiveRecordStore.

It seems to me that a simple fix to the CookieStore would be to add a
time stamp to the serialized (and signed) data.  Then an expiration
time frame could easily be enforced.

In general, stateless cookies like this have great advantages.  They
just need to be implemented correctly (which is admittedly tricky).

tim

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