cookies

Dude, where’s my WordPress session?

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WordPress is a favourite hackers target. Some say that is because it is inherently insecure, but in reality WordPress is mainly a target because of its popularity, because of people not keeping their installations up to date or using easy to guess usernames and passwords and because of vulnerabilities in plugins rather then WordPress itself.
There is, however, one security-related shortcoming in WordPress from a design point of view: sessions are not stored server-side. If someone logs in, a cookie is set in the browser containing username, a session expiration timestamp and a hash. With every new request to WordPress that cookie (and specifically the hash) is checked to validate the session, but there is no check to see if there indeed was such a session.
This can be considered mainly a theoretical shortcoming, not an immediately exploitable vulnerability, because;

  1. session-cookies are set with the HTTPOnly-flag so XSS should not be an issue
  2. in an ideal world all traffic, once logged in, would be over HTTPS, securing against network sniffing.

But there are other (albeit less obvious) ways to steal cookies or even create create new ones to gain unauthorized access, as demonstrated in this very detailed blogpost. As explained in that article, there is no way to block “fake” session-cookies from gaining access (your OTP plugin won’t protect you either) and there is no functionality to monitor and if needed delete sessions.
So … I wrote a small proof-of-concept plugin that gets triggered upon login, logout and upon session verification (i.e. each request) and which stores sessions server-side, automatically logging out unknown sessions. With that in place, lots of other optional features could easily be added;

  • display a list of all known current sessions
  • allow one or more sessions to be removed
  • compare IP address at session verification against the one at session creation and notify or logout if no match
  • compare User Agent (and optionally some HTTP accept-headers) at session verification against the one at session creation and notify or logout if no match
  • create an audit log
  • …

But … I don’t want to do this on my own. I have 3 plugins already, 2 of which are semi-popular and for which I try to do regular releases and provide great support (and I have a daytime-job and a wife and daughter with whom I love to spend quality time as well). Moreover I really don’t want the plugin to “just” be open source, but I want it to be developed in an open source, collaborative manner as well.
So if you’re a WordPress coder, a security consultant or just an innocent passer-by and you are willing to code, review code, translate or document, then do drop me a line. Fame (but not fortune) will be yours!

Firefox preferences for greater privacy

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Although browser addons such as NoScript and Ghostery (which is cross-browser with some limitations) provide great protection against tracking, some people prefer not to have to install plugins. Firefox does have configuration options to somewhat limit what trackers can do. You can follow the knowledge base article here to learn how to disable 3rd party cookies (the default setting in Safari, which Google was caught circumventing).
If you’re up to it, you also simply open up the almighty “about:config” and tinker with the following settings (some of which aren’t available in the browser UI):

  • network.cookie.cookieBehavior with values:
    • “0”: allow all cookies (default)
    • “1”: don’t allow 3rd party cookies
    • “2”: don’t allow any cookies
  • network.cookie.thirdparty.lifetimePolicy with values:
    • “0”: keep cookies for as long as the server asks
    • “1”: ask the user on each and every cookie set (try it out if only for fun, you’d be surprise how much cookies are set)
    • “2”: cookie gets deleted when you close your browser (i.e. at the end of the session)
    • “3”: cookies have a lifetime as defined in the “network.cookie.lifetime.days ” preference
  • network.cookie.thirdparty.sessionOnly: set to “true” or “false”
  • privacy.donottrackheader.enabled: set to “false” (default) or “true”, which gently asks sites not to track you

Setting “network.cookie.thirdparty.sessionOnly” to “true” is a low-impact change which should stop tracking-companies (think Media6degrees or Quantcast) from following you around the web.
If you want to stop Facebook, Google & Co to stop tracking you around the web as well, the above setting will not suffice. You should either log out of their sites as soon as you’ve done your business there or set “network.cookie.cookieBehavior” to “1” (which will break their “social widgets”). Or you can install Ghostery or NoScript, off course.