Session Management: Secure Cookies and Timeouts
How to implement secure server-side sessions: session ID generation, cookie attributes, idle timeout, and logout invalidation.
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Tags: security, authentication, sessions
Session Management: Secure Session IDs, Storage, and Expiry HTTP is stateless. Every request is independent, with no memory of what came before. Sessions are the mechanism that injects state into this stateless protocol — they let a server remember that you logged in three minutes ago and you're still the same person. Done wrong, session management becomes one of the most exploited surfaces in web security. What Is a Session? When a user authenticates, the server creates a session record and hands back a session identifier. On every subsequent request, the client presents that identifier, the server looks up the session record, and the request proceeds as the authenticated user. The session ID is essentially a high-value bearer credential. Anyone who holds it can impersonate the user for…
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