Cookie Protection

Cookies can be used by creative attackers to cause unexpected problems for your company. These tiny packets of data are usually only supposed to be used by browsers to interact with a server and remember small preferences of the last visit, such as how a preference has been selected by a visitor. Attackers however can exploit the contents of a cookie and how they are digested by a server, causing them to have all sorts of negative effects, depending on how vulnerable your configuration is. Rather than invest time and money in becoming an expert on web server cookies and all the ways that they can be abused to cause you trouble, let our Cookie Protection keep you safe.

For example, someone might visit your site and use your online store to add an item to their shopping cart and then leave. Information like the item number, and more importantly price, might be stored in a cookie so when the user returns, they do not have to add it again.

A malicious user might manually edit the information inside the cookie with a new price for the item. If they then visit a vulnerable server, it could permit them to complete the checkout process using the new price, and if this isn’t noticed, let the user purchase and acquire the item at this invalid amount. Cookie signing protects against this type of exploiting, since when this user edited the contents, the digital signature would no longer be valid and Astaro would then discard it and not pass it to the web server.