Friday, July 04, 2008

Cookie Path Traversal

Not sure if anyone actually cares about this, but thought I might just throw it out here: I found out a while ago that if a server is running IIS (or something else which accepts windows-style paths), then it is possible to get cookies sent to paths that they do not belong to by using an encoded backslash to indicate a directory delimiter like this: http://www.microsoft.com/en/us/test/..%5Cdefault.aspx

It works on all the browsers I tested (latest versions of IE, Firefox, Opera & Safari).

Not really useful, maybe on the off chance that, say, you need httpOnly cookies for some reason, and you can see headers for part of a path (e.g. because there's a phpinfo page in the root, but the cookie is for /app), or whatever, supposedly this was considered a security issue by Secunia way back when you could use %2e%2e/ on all servers in all browsers: http://secunia.com/advisories/9680/ (Though I think the premise for that bug is that you can't jump pages, which is of course wrong)

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Not using parent paths should get around this (IIS is now set to disallow by default)