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lect28-cookies
cookies
chapter 9
From PHP Visual Quickstart Guide by Larry Ullman
Originally based on notes by Jack Davis (jcdavis@radford.edu)
Summary: Cookies.
- Concepts:
- A way of hacking state, between two different http requests/visits.
- The server wants to remember something for a future visit, so it
asks the client to remember it for them, and toprovide that info
on all future requests.1
-
This is a cooperation between client and server.
(In particular, client can choose to ignore requests to cooperate.)
- Technicalities:
- call set_cookie; see docs for its args/info
(including the sentinel expiration-date of 0)
- ...
- Pragmatics/Gotchas:
As larger more complex web sites are being built the
limitation of http as a stateless protocol becomes a
problem. Web developers have no built in (html) method
of remembering data from one page of an application
to the next. This is a serious short-coming, e-commerce
systems, user registration and login systems, and other
online services rely on this functionality. Fortunately,
maintaining state from one page to another is fairly
simple using PHP.
- Cookies
-
(Note: we will not use cookies directly, in this class;
we'll use sessions. But sessions are built on top of cookies,
knowing how cookies work are a requirement for understanding sessions.)
- Cookies are a method for the server to store information about the user --
on the user's machine -- so that the server can remember
the user over the course of the visit or through several
web visits.
-
A cookie is just a key=>value entry
(just like a php array entry, or javascript object property,
or a java.util.Map entry, or json line).
-
It lives on the client machine,
and is provided by the browser when a request is made.
A PHP script can access
cookies by looking in the super-global $_COOKIE.
-
Example:
If a php script tells a browser to
setcookie('hamburger-price', 2.70) today,
and then the browser visits that same site next Tuesday,
the php can evaluate $_COOKIE['hamburger-price']
and get back 2.7.
-
In addition to the name/value pair, a cookie also has:
an expiration date, a domain, and a directory path.
Whenever a browser requests, a page, it attaches all cookie key/value pairs,
and sends those to the server — if the domain and path match.
So if you visit a page that performs a
setcookie('hamburger-price', 2.70, '/~ibarland', 'php.radford.edu'),
and later you visit
https://php.radford.edu/~ibarland/someDir/somefile.php,
your browser will attach the hamburger-price cookie.
But if you visit
https://php.radford.edu/~jcdavis/someDir/somefile.php,
the browser won't attach the cookie.
Similarly if you visit
https://rucs.radford.edu/~ibarland/someDir/somefile.php,
the browser won't attach the cookie either.
(Note that setting a cookie for '.radford.edu' (note the initial .),
this refers to all machines within the radford.edu domain.)
Don't make two different cookies with the same path, but different domains
(one a superset of the other).
Different browsers may choose differently, which one gets sent.
(AFAICT: the more specific path wins; but for same paths with
two applicable domains, the first cookie set made wins.)
It's not exactly advisable to make two different cookies with
the same name but different paths either, though that may not be enforceable,
e.g. /~ibarland and /~jcdavis may each contain
different scripts that happen to use the cookie “monster”.
Note also that if I set a cookie's path to be /,
then this is potentially a security flaw:
if somebody visits my script and I set a cookie secret-code-word
with server&path being radford.edu & /,
and then that person visits (say) radford.edu/~jcdavis,
his script will be sent the cookie that I had saved.
(He's a sly one, that jcdavis!)
Upshot: don't set the cookie's server&path to include URLs that others control.
-
You can look at the cookies on your machine itself:
e.g.
Chrome > Preferences… > Show advanced settings… Privacy >
Content Settings… > All cookies and site data…,
and then use the search-box for (say) radford or amazon
- The full parameter-list lets you set all the info seen above:
setcookie(name, value, expiration, path, domain, secure, httponly);
- name — (required) cookie name
- value — (required) limited to 4KB of data, string
- expiration — (optional) used to set a specific
length of time for the cookie to exist. To set the
expiration time, you add time to the current time.
The time() function can be used to build this parameter,
setcookie('my-c-name','some-value',time() + 3600);
The setting expiration-time as 0 is a sentinel, meaning to
never expire.
If omitted, the default expiration is when the user closes their browser.
- path and domain (optional) parameters are used to limit a cookie
to a specific folder in a Web site (the path) or to
a specific domain, so this might be used to limit a
cookie to a subdomain, such as forum.example.com
Using the path option, you could limit a cookie to exist only
while a user is in the user folder of the domain:
setcookie('name','value',time() + 3600, '/user/');
- secure value (optional) dictates that a cookie should
only be sent over a secure HTTPS connection. A value
of 1 indicates that a secure connection must be used,
whereas, 0 indicates that a secure connection isn't
required.
setcookie(name,value,time()+3600,'','',1);
- httponly (optional) — can be used to restrict access to
the cookie (for example, preventing a cookie from being
read using Javascript) but isn't supported by all browsers.
- It is essential to remember:
Cookies are created by the server, but stored on the client machine.
This explains why you have to call setcookie (rather than
just assign $_COOKIE['hamburger-price'] = ...):
You actually want to send cookies to the browser to remember (which is what
setcookie(…) does, and what assigning
to an array can't do).
It also explains why:
You must call setcookie before sending any other HTML —
the set-cookie info is sent to the browser as part of the http header, which
must be sent before any of the HTML data.
- Cookies have gotten a bad rap because some users
believe cookies allow a server to know too much
about them. However, a cookie can only be used to
store information that you give it, so it's as
secure as you want it to be.
- Script Example
lect28-cookies-customize.php
- Deleting a Cookie -
Delete the existing cookies by sending blank cookies and complete the PHP code.
setcookie('name','',time()-600);
You can also set the timeout to 1 (second after the epoch-start);
note that setting it to 0 (or omitting) defaults to
timing out at end of browser session.
Third party cookies
Example:
Remember, (hosted) images are often stored on a different server than
the page's "text" data.
Cookies can be set when retrieving images!
-
When you request cia.gov, the response includes the
html “<img src='http://lotofbanners.com/qwerty.jpg' … />”.
-
Sure enough, your browser makes a request to lotofbanners.com, which responds
with the requested jpeg, and also has your browser set the
cookie victimID = 47 for the domain lotofbanners.com.
-
Later, you request mediawiki.org, whose response also include
the html for the same banner.
-
Sure enough, your browser makes a request to lotofbanners.com — but this time
your browser is passing along the cookie victimID = 47 —
and now that site knows that whoever victimID=47 is, that person has seen their ad twice.
(In this example, we're presuming that lotofbanners.com is storing the exact ads seen
by each victimID.)
This doesn't seem too bad — as written, lotofbanners.com doesn't actually
know who you are,
just that the same person viewing the current banner has previously seen certain other banners.
But this can be leveraged:
If they name their banners “qwerty-for-cia.jpeg” and
“qwerty-for-mediawiki.jpeg”
and so on, then
they can now know,
out of all this sites they give banners for,
which of those sites you've visited (and when).
Note that separately, just knowing a large chunk of browser history can be suprisingly specific,
when you include
specific-amazon-products-looked-at,
which takeout-restaurant-phone-numbers you're lokoing up,
what political-candidate-webpages you're viewing, and
what medical-info-pages you look at
—
from this
it is a not-unreasonable-step that one could conceviably
narrow down, with decent confidence,
somebody's neighborhood, diseases, how they vote, and what their favorite pizza topping is.
BUT, it would require a single company to be hosting banners/ads for lots and lots of different
companies,
so perhaps this isn't too big a worry?
Well, one last thought:
huge numbers of websites outsource to google-analytics, to get info about usage.
These google-third-party cookies can be combined with the exact google searches you make
and your gmail contents,
which can give that company a vast trove of highly specific information.
It's a good thing they use their power for good only!
(… until NSA gives a court-order,
or just plain steals the data from wiretaps placed on intercontinental data trunks…).
1Kinda like emails that start with
repeating/quoting the entire previous thread. ↩
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