Cookies and Sessions: A Study of what they are, how they can be Stolen and a Discussion on Security

Cookies and sessions are common and vital to a person’s experience on the Internet. The use of cookies was originally used to overcome a memoryless protocol while using a tiny amount of the system’s resources. Cookies make for a cohesive experience when shopping online, enjoying customized content, and even receiving personalized advertisements when casually surfing the Web. However, by design, cookies lack security. Our research begins by giving a background of cookies and sessions. It then introduces what session hijacking is, and a lab was constructed to test and show how a cookie can be stolen and replayed to gain authenticated access. Finally, the paper presents various countermeasures for common attacks and tools checking for authentication cookies vulnerabilities.

@article{Choi2019,
  title     = {Cookies and Sessions: A Study of what they are, how they can be Stolen and a Discussion on Security},
  journal   = {International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications},
  volume    = {10},
  number    = {1},
  year      = {2019},
  publisher = {The Science and Information Organization},
  author    = {Young B. Choi and Yin L. Loo and Kenneth LaCroix},
  doi       = {10.14569/IJACSA.2019.0100104},
  url       = {https://doi.org/10.14569/IJACSA.2019.0100104}
}