Fighting cookie theft using device bound sessions

bitfucker , 2 months ago

Be careful since it is a double edged sword. Device bound session means the browser has the capabilities to differentiate devices, and thus can be used for more accurate tracking information. Of course I’m not saying it is not useful, having created a fair share of websites myself, I know the pain of authentication on the web and how it can be challenging to secure from tons of possible attack vectors. And in my experience, the weakest link is always the user.

dev_null , 2 months ago

the browser has the capabilities to differentiate devices

The browser can do it whether this exists or not. The only information the website gets is that the browser supports this feature or not, and nothing else.

bitfucker , 2 months ago

My bad, I worded that badly. What I meant is that the website now has access to those features via the browser (js or some other mechanism). Now suddenly fingerprinting a device can be made easier.

dev_null , 2 months ago

That’s a valid concern, but according to the article all the website can access is the random public key, or the fact that the feature is unsupported in this browser (for an unspecified reason).

bitfucker , 2 months ago

Yeah, I’ve also read the article. I am just being cautious on how it can be used for other things that cause privacy concern. And so far, I’ve come up blank too.

Boomkop3 , 2 months ago

That took forever to implement, almost as if someone had stake in not doing this

CaptainBasculin , 2 months ago

Isn’t this what WebAuthn already does? Why introduce a new protocol when another one does the job well?

dracs , 2 months ago

I don’t think WebAuthn protects against cookie theft. WebAuthn better protects the login process. But if the result of the login process is still a session/auth cookie, that can be stolen like any other cookie.

blackfire , 2 months ago

This is an incredibly important step forward but I have to wonder why its taken this long to come up with.