Path: csiph.com!usenet.pasdenom.info!gegeweb.org!eternal-september.org!feeder.eternal-september.org!mx04.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Arno Welzel Newsgroups: comp.lang.php Subject: Re: Best practice, (secure), to save session data? Date: Fri, 15 Jun 2012 22:44:59 +0200 Organization: A noiseless patient Spider Lines: 32 Message-ID: <4FDB9ECB.5010200@arnowelzel.de> References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Injection-Info: mx04.eternal-september.org; posting-host="l9c/A+zTZgD4vXu1XJ7hjg"; logging-data="1409"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX199q9wx+Daq1t4yulMh2iWmmnRAVis7glU=" User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:12.0) Gecko/20120428 Thunderbird/12.0.1 In-Reply-To: Cancel-Lock: sha1:A2Wr84AEoMi7zWjzyNnDoYrrtOM= Xref: csiph.com comp.lang.php:6338 Simon, 14.06.2012 10:35: > We have a site where many users can login/logout, (giving them access to > their personal information). > > The users have 2 choices, either we 'remember' the user after they close > their browsers or not, (for up to 30 days). Which means, everybody who copies the cookie has access to the personal information. > It was suggested that I base64_encode/base64_decode the data as a cookie > but I am not sure about the security implications of doing that, (the > way I see it, if they can get the session cookie then they can just as > well access the base64_encoded data anyway). Yep. > We have an https site, but we also allow login/access via http. > > Any tutorial/reading material/suggestions on how I can store logged in > users credentials. You can't. Either you ask the user to enter the password/key *always* or the application becomes less secure, since the only security is that the cookie is not copied by an attacker. There is no "comfortable" way. -- Arno Welzel http://arnowelzel.de http://de-rec-fahrrad.de