Protecting against cross-subdomain cookie attacks

Question

I have been reading about cross-subdomain cookie attacks here.

A quick overview of how it works (from Wikipedia):

1. A web site www.example.com hands out subdomains to untrusted third parties
2. One such party, Mallory, who now controls evil.example.com, lures Alice to her site
3. A visit to evil.example.com sets a session cookie with the domain .example.com on Alice's browser
4. When Alice visits www.example.com, this cookie will be sent with the request, as the specs for cookies states, and Alice will have the session specified by Mallory's cookie.
5. If Alice now logs on, Mallory can use her account.

We are building a web app where customers will have their own subdomains: subdomain.ourapp.com.

Each customer will be able to upload template files which can contain javascript (for client side interaction).

Since javascript can be used to read/write cookies, how can we prevent the session fixation attack above? Note that we are only storing the session id in the cookie.

Sites like squarespace.com also allows users to inject their own javascript into their on pages on their own subdomain. Since it would be next to impossible to try and filter out javascript statements that set/read cookies in uploaded template files, how can we mitigate this attack vector?

Answer 1

The specific scenario can be prevented easily: Create a new sessionid on login.

Please note that the issues exists across domains, if the sessionid is an url-parameter.

Generating a new sesionid, however, not be sufficient to prevent other kinds of attack: Once Alice is logged in and visits Mallory's subdomain, will the cookie be transmitted?

It is common practice to use a completely different domain for all trusted activity. For example Google uses google.com for trusted activities and *.googleusercontent.com for untrusted sites.

Answer 2

The safest answer is to use entirely different domains.

If you use subdomains of the same domain, start by learning about the details of the possible attacks. There's a lot already written about this, on this site. See, e.g.,

• What cookie attacks are possible between computers in related DNS domains (*.example.com)?,
• Preventing insecure webapp on subdomain compromise security of main webapp,
• User-specific Subdomains : JavaScript security,
• my answer to Is security increased by using a subdomain per customer in a web-app?.

If you use subdomains of the same domain, here are some steps you can take to protect yourself: store all state on the server side (do not use cookies to store state on the client; instead, the only cookie you use should be a session ID); create a new session ID on login and logout; make sure the cookie is scoped to the subdomain (e.g., its scope should be foo.ourapp.com, not .ourapp.com); check at the server side to make sure you don't receive multiple cookies with the name; make sure to protect yourself against session fixation; if you use CORS, be very careful with your cross-domain policy to make sure you don't allow cross-subdomain requests.

Answer 3

Public Suffix has a list of domains that all vendors (Chrome/Firefox/IE/Safari/Opera) use to avoid this problem of stealing cookies from other subdomains (along side other features). The list is updated daily and is maintained on Github.

I got this information from Heroku's blog.

I have verified that Google's googleusercontent.com domain is included in the list along with herokuapp.com , herokussl.com domains.

Answer 4

I just had an idea. We can borrow an idea from the Encrypted Token Pattern: encrypt the cookie value!

If the cookie is only accessed by the server, you can use cheap symmetric encryption. Otherwise, use the more expensive public-key encryption.

This will allow you to detect when malicious subdomains delete your cookie and/or detect their attempts to write fake cookies.

Answer 5

I managed to solve this issue by storing exact subdomain in Session data on Server. And sending exact subdomain in cookie domain setting.

If user visit dom1.website.com first time I will store it in Session, and check in all future request that it match else reset session on server.

So if user using managed to trick browser and managed to send same cookie for dom2.website.com code will check the domain name value stored in Session will not match the domain it submitted against. so it will reset session on server.

Only side effect is that session on dom1.website.com will be cleared as well.