Cookies on-the-move: managing cookies on a smart card

  • Authors:

  • Alvin T. S. Chan

  • Affiliations:

  • The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hung Hom, Kowloon, SAR of China

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2004 ACM symposium on Applied computing
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

Despite the widespread use and adoption of cookies as the basis for web applications to keep state information, cookies present some design issues that are yet to be fully addressed. The fact that cookies are stored on client-side's memory means that they are tightly coupled to the machine that is interacting with the web server. Yet often, these cookies are initiated by web applications to identify user's preferences and identifications. As the user moves across different machines to access the same site, the information previously recorded is lost and the web application has no way of restoring the state, unless the user revisits the same client machine, where the original cookies were set. This paper presents a novel solution to address the need for cookies to be "mobile" by leveraging on smart card to manage cookies, with the benefit of mobility in a pocket. We describe the design and implementation of the CookiesCard framework that uses smart card as a secure and mobile storage media to manage personalized cookies. The article presents the development of the CookiesCard proxy that directly interacts with the smart card to provide cookies management, while acting as an intermediatary between the client browser and a web server.