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ASP.NET: How to set cookies as httponly

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Summary: How to set cookies as httponly

Need help with ASP.NET? Come and ask a question in our ASP.NET Forum


Rationale, Considerations and Limitations

To increase security, you should set your cookies to be "httponly". A good example of why can be found in Jeff Atwood's blog post here:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001167.html

The reason for doing this is to inform the User Agent (e.g. web browser) that the cookie being sent is only intended for the Web Server to keep track of information, such as user_id, status, etc, and not to allow client side scripts to read or use this cookie in anyway. This helps to limit the ability of attackers to gain access to this sensitive information through Cross Site Scripting (XSS) attacks. It isn't however, a complete fix - it makes life harder for the attacker, but there are ways around this depending on the sites vulnerabilities to XSS and CSRF and similar exploits. More info here: http://www.webappsec.org/lists/websecurity/archive/2006-05/msg00025.html


Implementation

To do this in ASP.NET is a fairly simple task. Simply add this line to your web.config file (just inside the system.web element):

  1. <httpCookies domain="String" httpOnlyCookies="true" requireSSL="false" />

NOTE: Make sure you replace the domain with your domain name.

You can also find more information on this setting in your MSDN help files:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms228262.aspx

This Hack is part of the ASP.NET Hacks collection

574 Rating: 2.0/5 (4 votes cast)