A New Internet-Draft is available from the on-line Internet-Drafts directories.
Title : SCS: Secure Cookie Sessions for HTTP
Author(s) : Stefano Barbato
Steven Dorigotti
Thomas Fossati
Filename : draft-secure-cookie-session-protocol-07.txt
Pages : 21
Date : 2012-10-08
Abstract:
This document provides an overview of SCS, a small cryptographic
protocol layered on top of the HTTP cookie facility, that allows its
users to produce and consume authenticated and encrypted cookies, as
opposed to usual cookies, which are un-authenticated and sent in
clear text.
An interesting property, rising naturally from the given
confidentiality and authentication properties, is that by using SCS
cookies, it is possible to avoid storing the session state material
on the server side altogether. In fact, an SCS cookie presented by
the user agent to the origin server can always be validated (i.e.
possibly recognized as self-produced, fresh, untampered material)
and, as such, be used to safely restore application state.
Hence, typical use cases may include devices with little or no
storage offering some functionality via an HTTP interface, as well as
web applications with high availability or load balancing
requirements which would prefer to handle application state without
the need to synchronize the pool through shared storage or peering.
Another noteworthy application scenario is represented by the
distribution of authorized web content (e.g. by CDNs), where an SCS
token can be used, either in a cookie or embedded in the URI, to
provide evidence of the entitlement to access the associated resource
by the requesting user agent.
Nevertheless, its security properties allow SCS to be used whenever
the privacy and integrity of cookies is a concern, by paying an
affordable price in terms of increased cookie size, additional CPU
clock cycles needed by the symmetric key encryption and HMAC
algorithms, and related key management, which can be made a nearly
transparent task.
The IETF datatracker status page for this draft is:
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-secure-cookie-session-protocol
There's also a htmlized version available at:
http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-secure-cookie-session-protocol-07
A diff from the previous version is available at:
http://www.ietf.org/rfcdiff?url2=draft-secure-cookie-session-protocol-07
Internet-Drafts are also available by anonymous FTP at:
ftp://ftp.ietf.org/internet-drafts/
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