Showing posts with label Session Hijacking. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Session Hijacking. Show all posts
Saturday, June 25, 2011
When logging into a website you usually start by submitting your username and password. The server then checks to see if an account matching this information exists and if so, replies back to you with a "cookie" which is used by your browser for all subsequent requests.
It's extremely common for websites to protect your password by encrypting the initial login, but surprisingly uncommon for websites to encrypt everything else. This leaves the cookie (and the user) vulnerable. HTTP session hijacking (sometimes called "sidejacking") is when an attacker gets a hold of a user's cookie, allowing them to do anything the user can do on a particular website. On an open wireless network, cookies are basically shouted through the air, making these attacks extremely easy.
Saturday, June 25, 2011 24
Saturday, April 30, 2011
What are session IDs or session cookies ?
Talking in simple language, whenever we sign into an account it generates a unique piece of string. One copy is saved on server and other in our browser as cookie. Both are matched every time we do anything in our account. This piece of string or login session is destroyed when we click on 'Sign Out' option.
Just login to yahoo.com. Type in browser javascript:alert(document.cookie);
You would get a pop up box showing you the cookies. Now login to your account and do same thing, you would see more elements added to the cookies. These represent sessions ids .
Note: By saying , stealing sessions or stealing cookies, I mean the same thing. Sessions are stored in our browser in form of cookies.
An attacker can steal that session by convincing victim to run a piece of code in browser. Attacker can use that stolen session to login into victim's account without providing any username/password. This attack is very uncommon because when the victim clicks 'Sign out' , session gets destroyed and attacker too also gets signed out.
Talking in simple language, whenever we sign into an account it generates a unique piece of string. One copy is saved on server and other in our browser as cookie. Both are matched every time we do anything in our account. This piece of string or login session is destroyed when we click on 'Sign Out' option.
Just login to yahoo.com. Type in browser javascript:alert(document.cookie);
You would get a pop up box showing you the cookies. Now login to your account and do same thing, you would see more elements added to the cookies. These represent sessions ids .
An attacker can steal that session by convincing victim to run a piece of code in browser. Attacker can use that stolen session to login into victim's account without providing any username/password. This attack is very uncommon because when the victim clicks 'Sign out' , session gets destroyed and attacker too also gets signed out.
Saturday, April 30, 2011 3
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