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Comment by Vendan | Hacker News Reader

Keep in mind, your authenticated cookie is exactly as easy to MITM as a ID storing cookie, and potentially more dangerous. A session can be deleted from the db, and then that session cookie is dead. An authenticated cookie is good forever, unless you start putting expiration times or something similar. Issue with that is now you have to make sure it's all done correctly, and there's no bugs that may make the cookie good forever/impossible to revoke. Whereas, you get that kinda stuff for free with a db backed session, just delete the session and they are logged out, period.

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You could always, you know, change the code (which is simple) so that an "infinite" expiry date is no longer valid. Line 215.

https://github.com/gorilla/securecookie/blob/master/secureco...

As for "impossible to revoke" well if you have control over your server you can do whatever you like so this falls into the very not-at-all-impossible category. As a baseline as long as there is no personal information in the "secure cookie" there really is no issue at all.

So you just removed the ability to have a "Log me in forever" checkbox.

A expiry date system is literally impossible to revoke without somehow maintaining a list of valid or invalid cookies, and by that point, you are hitting a database for each cookie.

So, one way, you don't have as much control, and you can't revoke a stolen cookie with potentially high level access rights. The other way, you are replicating a db backed session, and heaping complexity on top of it.

If we are dealing with a subset of bad cookies, then I suppose it becomes a hard question of what-to-do. We could put something into the code to distinguish and then require a minimum last good date of some sort. It is messy and I wouldn't want to do that, but really I just want to point out that your insistence on it being "impossible" just isn't true. If we just let ourselves revoke everything, then it is much simpler. I wonder how the "known subset of bad cookies" situation arises. I suppose it could, but you could in turn release an announcement telling your users that for all of their protection you are requiring that they login again, insert a minimum required date and move on with life. There are plenty of ways to deal with the situation and none of them are impossible.

Really? Could you try actually reading what I've written?

    impossible to revoke without somehow maintaining a list of valid or invalid cookies

Completely true. A minimum date like you are saying is still "some kind of list of valid or invalid cookies". Or are you going to get into the semantics of "that's not a list"? As an example of something that you can't do without tying a database into it, I've seen sites that let you log individual computers out of the system from your account page. No way to do that without a valid/not valid check in the DB.

Values are values whether or not they are in a db. It is situation dependant and probably not (happily) manageable in a large scale application. Saying things are "impossible" with such a heavy hand is a bit over the top. If my cookies have a date that is valid, then I can easily keep that bit of nasty logic in the code. I wouldn't do that personally, but it is doable. Take it easy :)

Would't we be able to avoid this if we did away with the secure cookie and replaced it with a jwt (jason web token)? This way, there is no state to maintain in the database, and authorization can expire?

there isn't much difference between a secure cookie and a JWT. Well, except that JWT is just signed, not encrypted, so your cookie contents are visible. Also, JWT has issues, https://auth0.com/blog/2015/03/31/critical-vulnerabilities-i.... The main thing is that you have added nothing by using JWT, cause you still can't expire a specific token without storing some kind of "token status" in the database.

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