Session hijacking

It has been suggested that Cookiemonster attack be merged into this article. (Discuss) Proposed since November 2024.

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In computer science, session hijacking, sometimes also known as cookie hijacking, is the exploitation of a valid computer session—sometimes also called a session key—to gain unauthorized access to information or services in a computer system. In particular, it is used to refer to the theft of a magic cookie used to authenticate a user to a remote server. It has particular relevance to web developers, as the HTTP cookies used to maintain a session on many websites can be easily stolen by an attacker using an intermediary computer or with access to the saved cookies on the victim's computer (see HTTP cookie theft). After successfully stealing appropriate session cookies an adversary might use the Pass the Cookie technique to perform session hijacking. Cookie hijacking is commonly used against client authentication on the internet. Modern web browsers use cookie protection mechanisms to protect the web from being attacked.^[1]

A popular method is using source-routed IP packets. This allows an attacker at point B on the network to participate in a conversation between A and C by encouraging the IP packets to pass through B's machine.

If source-routing is turned off, the attacker can use "blind" hijacking, whereby it guesses the responses of the two machines. Thus, the attacker can send a command, but can never see the response. However, a common command would be to set a password allowing access from elsewhere on the net.

An attacker can also be "inline" between A and C using a sniffing program to watch the conversation. This is known as a "man-in-the-middle attack".