Re: losing session data with cross-site scripting

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Steve Lefevre wrote:
No, it's not. They're totally separate machines at different ISPs.

In this case, a user's session is stagnant for the duration of their trip to the other server. I'm guessing that users are typically only there for a brief moment, but this is something to keep in mind. Is there a way that some of your users might spend more time than you expect at the development site?

> Checking Referer is useless, because everyone knows what you
> expect it to be.

I'm not following you. How would anyone know what it should be?
Do you know what it should be?

Heh. :-) Sorry about the ambiguity.

What I mean is that people are only likely to know where your spell-checking thing is if they use your site. These people, by using your site, are going to know what the expected Referer is. Does that make more sense?

In order to highlight how useless checking the Referer is, I often point out that making the attacker choose between heads and tails offers more protection. The attacker is only going to be right about half the time instead of all the time.

That could be, but it consistently affects only one user on her
home computer, but not on her work.

That's unfortunate. Your best bet might be to log everything you can - all HTTP headers for each request, all session activity, etc. If you can't reproduce the problem yourself, it's going to be very hard to debug (as I'm sure you've noticed).

I guess I'm confused about what cross-site scripting is

No problem - I thought you might have just left out something. Cross-site scripting is something else.

By the way, you might consider using session_set_save_handler() to write your own session handling functions (temporarily), so that you can add more logging. I've found this to be helpful when debugging extremely sophisticated session problems.

Hope that helps.

Chris

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Chris Shiflett
Brain Bulb, The PHP Consultancy
http://brainbulb.com/

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