Password security: a case history
Communications of the ACM
Dos and don'ts of client authentication on the web
SSYM'01 Proceedings of the 10th conference on USENIX Security Symposium - Volume 10
A future-adaptive password scheme
ATEC '99 Proceedings of the annual conference on USENIX Annual Technical Conference
CAPTCHA: using hard AI problems for security
EUROCRYPT'03 Proceedings of the 22nd international conference on Theory and applications of cryptographic techniques
Getting web authentication right: a best-case protocol for the remaining life of passwords
SP'11 Proceedings of the 19th international conference on Security Protocols
Origin-bound certificates: a fresh approach to strong client authentication for the web
Security'12 Proceedings of the 21st USENIX conference on Security symposium
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Stateless session cookies allow web applications to alter their behaviour based on user preferences and access rights, without maintaining server-side state for each session. This is desirable because it reduces the impact of denial of service attacks and eases database replication issues in load-balanced environments. The security of existing session cookie proposals depends on the server protecting the secrecy of a symmetric MAC key, which for engineering reasons is usually stored in a database, and thus at risk of accidental leakage or disclosure via application vulnerabilities. In this paper we show that by including a salted iterated hash of the user password in the database, and its preimage in a session cookie, an attacker with read access to the server is unable to spoof an authenticated session. Even with knowledge of the server's MAC key the attacker needs a user's password, which is not stored on the server, to create a valid cookie. By extending an existing session cookie scheme, we maintain all the previous security guarantees, but also preserve security under partial compromise.