Re: [http-state] Ticket 11: Character encoding for non-ASCII cookies values

[Adam Barth <[e-mail]>]

See inline.

On Wed, Mar 3, 2010 at 4:51 PM, Mark Pauley <[e-mail]> wrote:
> You're correct, we do allow those.  What I'm worried about though is that
> valid UTF-8 sequences will contain \r\n .   In any case, writing good
> parsers for a variable-length is really tough.
> To give you a sense of what Safari will accept, we'll accept the following
> for names or values in cookies:
> CTL = [\x00-\x1F\x7F];
> NETSCAPE_SPECIAL = ("," | ";" | "=" | SPACE | HTAB);
> NONETSCAPE_VALCHAR = (CTL | NETSCAPE_SPECIAL);
> NETSCAPE_CHAR = ((CHAR \ NONETSCAPE_VALCHAR) | COMMA_NOSPACE);
> COMMA_NOSPACE = ((",")(CHAR \ (SPACE | HTAB | ";")));
> NETSCAPE_VAL = (CHAR \ NONETSCAPE_VALCHAR)((NETSCAPE_CHAR | SPACE | HTAB)*
> NETSCAPE_CHAR)?;
>
> And NETSCAPE_VAL is effectively our TOKEN.

This grammar is significantly more complicated than what appears to be
necessary.  Is there some reason the paring algorithm in
<http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-httpstate-cookie-04#section-5.2>
is insufficient?

> We allow for quoted values, but those still reject the CTL class of
> character.

Safari is currently the only browser to treat quote characters in
cookie values differently from other characters.  (Note that Firefox
used to have this behavior but changed recently to match IE and
Chrome.)  Safari seems to have adopted this behavior in the past two
years.  Source inside Apple have indicated that this change was made
to improve compliance with RFC 2109 and not because of specific web
compatibility concerns.

> So, we certainly will choke on many UTF-8 character sequences.  In that
> case, we'll just ditch the cookie header as a whole.

Indeed.  Safari is currently the only browser that has this behavior.

> One of the main problems so far with cookies has been that the Date spec
> used in the Netscape implementation clashes with the standard of HTTP to
> separate values in headers by a comma token.  That is I believe, some sites
> wish to set multiple cookies by using a comma separator whereas the comma is
> also used as part of an unquoted field.  If we can verify that nobody is
> actually trying to set multiple cookies per Set-Cookies header, then we can
> easily pull this functionality and be a bit more blind to the character set
> of the Set-Cookie header value.

The date parsing algorithm is specified in detail in
<http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-httpstate-cookie-04#section-5.1.1>.

Unlike most HTTP headers, a comma cannot be used to combine multiple
Set-Cookie headers.  Safari appears to be the only browser that
attempts to support this behavior.

If you haven't already, I'd encourage you to read the latest draft
available at <http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-httpstate-cookie>.
 Hopefully that will answer some number of your questions.

Adam


> On Mar 3, 2010, at 12:53 PM, Daniel Stenberg wrote:
>
> On Wed, 3 Mar 2010, Mark Pauley wrote:
>
> In the future, we ought to treat these as opaque octets.  However, the
> current cookie spec would lead me to believe that we should reject any
> cookies that contain control characters, which would be most non-ascii UTF-8
> sequences, right?
>
> Isn't the RFC2616 'token' a bit too strict for cookie-value ? The netscape
> spec is _very_ liberal ("a sequence of characters excluding semi-colon,
> comma and white space") so the current wording is a great deal more
> restrictive.
>
> Don't cookie implementations already allow and use for example ()<>:@? etc?
>
> --
>
> / daniel.haxx.se
>
>