[http-state] Seeking feedback on Security Considerations

[Adam Barth <[e-mail]>]

The new draft that I've uploaded
<http://www.ietf.org/id/draft-ietf-httpstate-cookie-03.txt> contains
an updated and expanded Security Considerations section.  I've been
circulating this section among security experts for feedback.  If you
have some feedback on this section, I'd like to encourage you to let
me know at this time.

I've reproduced the Security Considerations section below for your convenience.

Thanks,
Adam



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.