note 110324 deleted from function.setcookie by cmb
| From: | cmb@php.net | Date: | Sun, 10 Nov 2019 12:48:44 +0000 |
| Subject: | note 110324 deleted from function.setcookie by cmb | ||
| References: | 1 | Groups: | php.notes |
| Request: | Send a blank email to php-notes+get-213001@lists.php.net to get a copy of this message | ||
Note Submitter: herrkampfgarten at gmail dot com
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Please note that setting the expiry to some timestamp in the past is a common way to get rid of a
cookie. However, depending on the value you might set to "invalidate" a cookie
immediately, this may pose a threat to the privacy of your user's data, especially when it
comes to session cookies.
If you write "0" and "expire-in-the-past" into a session cookie, it remains on
the client-side until the clean-up mechanism of the browser hits. (That might be anything from
no-time to a very long time. I'm not even thinking of app-based mobile browsers that won't
close properly or do their best to ignore standards and RFCs and stuff...)
So, if you have sufficiently messed up your ways of picking up existing session IDs and
write-closing their data to your server, the session's data might move from file
"sess_(random)" to "sess_0", because that is exactly the identifier that is
referred in the cookie.
From now on (at least until your server decides to clean up) there is data laying open wide to
anyone requesting the session "0". Which may happen by accident (i.e. another user gains
an own "0"-cookie) or malice (i.e. forgery).
Long story short, ALWAYS use an empty string instead of a "0" value for invalidating a
session cookie.