SESSION ID STRUCTURE AND SECURITY AT GENERATION TIME

                                             
In a previous blog, we discuss Statelessness of HTTP Protocol due to which we implement session. once authenticated session is established then SESSION ID is temporarily equivalent to
strongest authentication methods such as Username and Password, OTP, Smartcards, Biometrics etc

SESSION ID STRUCTURE:

Session ID sturcture is like "name=value"                       example: JSESSIONID=21D9189EF4375A7D820B90B3B050500B
our basic goal is to secure session ID

FOR DEVELOPERS:
 Developers must remember these points in the generation of Session ID:

  SESSION ID NAME:

  It should not be descriptive, session ID name like 
  1. PHPSESSID(PHP), 
  2. ASP.NET_Sessionid(ASP.NET),
  3. JSESSIONID(J2EE) etc 
  can disclose the technologies and programming languages. Best thing is that if we replace the default session ID  name to  Generic Name like "id".

 SESSION ID LENGTH:

 To prevent the BRUTE FORCE attacks length of the Session ID must be long enough.  Session ID length must be 128 bits.

 SESSION ID UNPREDICTABLE OR RANDOM ENOUGH:

 That the attacker can't predict it easily if Session ID  has 64 bits entropy (randomness)  then it will take at least 292 years to successfully guess a valid session ID, assuming the attacker can try 10,000 guesses per second with 100,000 valid simultaneous session available  at any given time.

TIME TAKEN FOR SUCCESSFUL BRUTE FORCE ATTACK

We can use good PRNG(Pseudo Random Number Generator) to increase the  Entropy

SESSION ID CONTENT:

This content must be meaningless to prevent information disclosure attacks.

Session ID simply an identifier at Client Side
                 

METHODS OF PASSING SESSION ID:

    There are basically three methods for passing Session ID:

 
     1.In the URL (avoid it)

     2.HIDDEN FIELD

     3.COOKIES (preferred it)

• Among these three COOKIES is preferred because in that we can set the EXPIRATION date and time of Session ID and some other advance things.
• URL is not used because ID is included in URL and ID can disclose in web browser history, bookmarks etc. which can lead to SESSION FIXATION attack.

REQUIREMENT OF SESSION

HTTP PROTOCOL:

    HTTP is a HYPER TEXT TRANSFER PROTOCOL . It is used to deliver data on the world wide web (www),data may be HTML files,image files,query results, etc but HTTP is the STATELESS protocol because each command we request is executed separately, without any knowledge of the requests that were executed before it IN SHORT HTTP protocol don't have brain .

DEMONSTRATION OF STATELESSNESS OF HTTP

EFFECT OF THAT :

for example-

•  if we login to any social n/w site like facebook or any other sites
• we put our username and password and hit enter if we authentic then we login 
• if we rely only on HTTP protocol if we send same request then we have to again enter the user name and password for authentication purpose

HOW TO REMOVE THAT PROBLEM:

by introducing the SESSION ID

DEMONSTRATION OF SESSION ID