The Web Application Hacker’s Handbook Discovering and Exploiting Security Flaws

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Chapter 7 

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Attacking Session Management

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Liberal Cookie Scope

The usual simple summary of how cookies work is that the server issues a

cookie using the HTTP response header 

Set-cookie

, and the browser then

resubmits this cookie in subsequent requests to the same server using the

Cookie

header. In fact, matters are rather more subtle than this.

The cookie mechanism allows a server to specify both the domain and the

URL path to which each cookie will be resubmitted. To do this, it uses the 

domain

and 

path

attributes that may be included in the 

Set-cookie

instruction.