I am interested to see what people are storing in my session and cookies when I visit websites. Is there any way to see what's in there between request and when I'm on pages in Safari, Chrome, or Firefox?
In Firefox you can use among others Firebug to check the cookies being sent forth and back. Check the Net panel for complete request and response headers. The cookies are present as Set-Cookie response header whenever the session starts and as Cookie request header on all subsequent requests in the same session.
Here's a screenshot of the transferred headers when requesting this topic:
(note that I removed the user cookie value from the screenshot, else someone else would be able to copy it and login as myself)
You cannot check in the client side in any way what's been stored in the server side session since that's usually not exposed in the cookie values. Only the session identifier is stored as cookie value. You can at highest make some guesses based on the behaviour of the website across the requests.
Related
For authenticating one product it needs to set some cookies. But the cookies are not getting set up. We collected the trace using fiddler. We can see that cookies are available in the response but some how next request is not carrying those cookies.
No proxies for firefox.
We even added the fqdn in trusted site list.
Cookies are enabled.
We collected fiddler trace, the response says that it is adding the cookie but the next request does not have those cookies.
Appreciate any help for narrowing down the issue.
FiddlerTrace-Screenshot1
We asked customer to check the system why the browser does not accept the cookies for .xyx.com. It took sometime and they could not figure out why.
So to make the product work we changed the cookie to create for .abc.xyx.com. This resolved the issue.
Today I faced the term "cookiejar" (package net/http/cookiejar). I tried to gather some information regarding it, but got nothing intelligible came out. I know that cookie is key/value pairs that server sends to a client, eg: Set-Cookie: foo=10, browser stores it locally and then each subsequent request browser will send these cookies back to the server, eg: Cookie: foo=10.
Ok, but what about cookiejar? What is it and how does it look like?
As you described in your question, cookies are managed by browsers (HTTP clients) and they allow to store information on the clients' computers which are sent automatically by the browser on subsequent requests.
If your application acts as a client (you connect to remote HTTP servers using the net/http package), then there is no browser which would handle / manage the cookies. By this I mean storing/remembering cookies that arrive as Set-Cookie: response headers, and attaching them to subsequent outgoing requests being made to the same host/domain. Also cookies have expiration date which you would also have to check before deciding to include them in outgoing requests.
The http.Client type however allows you to set a value of type http.CookieJar, and if you do so, you will have automatic cookie management which otherwise would not exist or you would have to do it yourself. This enables you to do multiple requests with the net/http package that the server will see as part of the same session just as if they were made by a real browser, as often HTTP sessions (the session ids) are maintained using cookies.
The package net/http/cookiejar is a CookieJar implementation which you can use out of the box. Note that this implementation is in-memory only which means if you restart your application, the cookies will be lost.
So basically an HTTP cookie is a small piece of data sent from a website and stored in a user's web browser while the user is browsing that website.
Cookiejar is a Go interface of a simple cookie manager (to manage cookies from HTTP request and response headers) and an implementation of that interface.
In general it is a datastore where an application (browser or not) puts the cookies it uses during requests and responses. So it is really a jar for cookies.
I am trying (for days) to make this work: I want to connect to a Media Servers using RTMPT netConnection. In order to reach that, I have to pass an authentication cookie along with my request. In Chrome and IE it works, but in Firefox it doesen't pass the auth_cookie.
When I look into logs I see the /open/1 request, but it has no cookie atached. Againg: in Chrome and IE it uses the cookie. The cookie doesn't have the HttpOnly flag.
Another weird scenario that I encountered is: Because it dosen't pass the cookie, the ApplicationServer wich holds the autentication, asks me for credentials. If I enter them it takes the cookie and works, and any subsequent connections work (firefox passes the auth_cookie along the /open/1 request); but if I delete all the cookies in browser (via CookieController-> Remove ALL cookies and DOM storage) the credentials are requested again (no cookie is passed).
Any sugestions? I've searched all the internet for a solution but I can't find anything...
I have multiple subdomains in my app. There is a parent domain cookie for user logins/session, and a subdomain cookie for cross site request forgery protection (CSRF). Requests go between subdomains using cross origin resource sharing (CORS), using the login/session cookie for all subdomains.
main.foo.com is where the user logs in. The login/session cookie uses the domain foo.com.
app.foo.com is where a large portion of the app resides. This is the active page when my error occurs.
message.foo.com is used for sending messages between users. It is its own django app, with a csrf cookie using domain message.foo.com for use with its forms. It also uses the login/session cookie from foo.com.
So the user is on app.foo.com/index.php and an ajax POST needs to go to message.foo.com. The browser has made ajax GET requests to message.foo.com, which have set the CSRF cookie. The ajax POST is sent with proper CORS headers.
If I disable CSRF in the Django view using #csrf_exempt decorator, then the missing cookie is ignored and the POST is processed fine. Otherwise, I get the 403 error for CSRF.
The CSRF cookie is sent from Firefox and Chrome in normal mode. When Chrome is Incognito, the CSRF cookie is not sent.
From what I can tell, the difference between the cookies is their domain. The login/session cookie is set to foo.com, so all subdomains use it. The CSRF cookie is set by message.foo.com so it should only be sent back to that domain. But even when the request is going to message.foo.com, Chrome Incognito does not send the cookie. It may not have even accepted the cookie. (It's hard to tell if it didn't accept the cookie or if it's just not sending it back.)
This cookie scenario seems legit. The cookie is being sent back to the subdomain which set it. No other subdomains are trying to read or modify the cookie. The origin sending the request has been authorized with CORS headers.
Why does Chrome not send that cookie? Is this behavior documented somewhere?
Sorry, Stack Overflow. This question isn't actually about what I thought it was.
The problem is that I did something in my Django code which was stopping the CSRF cookie from being sent to the browser. The non-incognito browsers still had the cookie saved, but the incognito one dropped the cookie when it was closed. So when I re-opened the browsers, they still had their old CSRF cookie except the incognito browser.
I discovered this when I renamed the CSRF cookie and all the browsers stopped working. I had seen the cookie in Firebug and the Chrome dev tools, so I thought it was still being sent when it wasn't.
So, the end result is that the cookies work as I expected. All my confusion was due to the cached cookies still being sent. As far as I can tell now, the only difference with Incognito is that it clears out all the cookies when you close the last Incognito window.
Hopefully others will be reminded by this question that the cache could be getting in the way of your debugging. Checking for that early in this process could have saved me a lot of time.
How does browser send back cookie to the server during post requests. How is this different than the form data that is sent during a post ?
Also are the values of cookies for a particular domain automatically sent back to the domain for all its subsequent requests ?
Thanks,
Murtaza
There is no different between how cookies are sent for GET and POST requests.
Form data is data such as fields from an HTML Form, eg. name, username, file, etc...
Any cookies sent back in a response from a domain will be sent back to the server in subsequent requests. This is true in web browsers at least, if you are doing this in code, you might have to write additional code to handle cookies.
This should work for AJAX calls made by your browser as well as full pages. Every request, be it full pages, images or AJAX calls will have the Cookies attached if they are going to an appropriate domain and path.
These primers on cookies and HTTP POST would be useful:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_cookie
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POST_(HTTP)