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ColdFusion Function to Set HttpOnly Cookie

It's gotten so I can't think about writing any code without fretting about security while I'm doing it.  I know, I know, that's a good thing.  Still one does long for the old days when the makers of small to medium-sized websites could get away with lax security just because the big sites had enough security holes to keep the hackers busy.  And those hackers didn't have as many automated tools to make hacking lots of sites easier.

Anyway, those days are long gone and none of us has to be labeled paranoid, because they really are out to get us.

So, on my security checklist was to start using HttpOnly cookies for potentially sensitive cookies (like those related to login).  HttpOnly cookies have been supported for a while by Internet Explorer, and Firefox has recently started supporting them.  What's good about HttpOnly cookies is that their values can not be accessed through javascript, which stops a variety of cross-site-scripting attacks.  For more info, here is a good page:

http://www.12robots.com/index.cfm/2009/1/5/mmmmMMmmmmmmm-Cookies--Security-Series-12

The problem that comes up immediately for a ColdFusion developer is that the CFCOOKIE tag does not support httponly cookies.  This seems like a gross oversite, especially since it should be very easy to implement.  In order to use httponly cookies, you need to use the CFHEADER tag to to write the specially formatted cookie header to the browser.  I looked around but couldn't find anyone online that had created a function that handled all of the functions of CFCOOKIE with the addition of httponly.  Anyway, here is what I came up with. 

<cffunction name="SetCookie" hint="Replacement for cfcookie that handles httponly cookies" output="false" returntype="void">
    <cfargument name="name" type="string" required="true">
    <cfargument name="value" type="string" required="true">
    <cfargument name="expires" type="any" default="" hint="''=session only|now|never|[date]|[number of days]">
    <cfargument name="domain" type="string" default="">
    <cfargument name="path" type="string" default="/">
    <cfargument name="secure" type="boolean" default="false">
    <cfargument name="httponly" type="boolean" default="false">
    <cfset var c = "#UCase(name)#=#value#;">
    <cfset var expDate = "">
    <cfswitch expression="#Arguments.expires#">
        <cfcase value="">
        </cfcase>
        <cfcase value="now">
            <cfset expDate = DateAdd('d',-1,Now())>
        </cfcase>
        <cfcase value="never">
            <cfset expDate = DateAdd('yyyy',30,Now())>
        </cfcase>
        <cfdefaultcase>
            <cfif IsDate(Arguments.expires)>
                <cfset expDate = Arguments.expires>
            <cfelseif IsNumeric(Arguments.expires)>
                <cfset expDate = DateAdd('d',Arguments.expires,Now())>
            </cfif>
        </cfdefaultcase>
    </cfswitch>
    <cfif IsDate(expDate) gt 0>
        <cfset expDate = DateConvert('local2Utc',expDate)>
        <cfset c = c & "expires=#DateFormat(expDate, 'ddd, dd-mmm-yyyy')# #TimeFormat(expDate, 'HH:mm:ss')# GMT;">
    </cfif>
    <cfif Len(Arguments.domain) gt 0>
        <cfset c = c & "domain=#Arguments.domain#;">
    </cfif>
    <cfif Len(Arguments.path) gt 0>
        <cfset c = c & "path=#Arguments.path#;">
    </cfif>
    <cfif Arguments.secure>
        <cfset c = c & "secure;">
    </cfif>
    <cfif Arguments.httponly>
        <cfset c = c & "httponly;">
    </cfif>
    <cfheader name="Set-Cookie" value="#c#" />
</cffunction>

It's actually pretty simple, with the expires portion of the header being the only thing that required a little work.  I have attempted to mimic the CFCOOKIE functionality so that this can be used more or less as a simple replacement for that tag.  Here's an example of usage:

<cfset SetCookie(
    name="logintoken",
    value="sometoken",
    secure=true,
    httponly=true)>

I hope this proves helpful to others.

Comments (2)   Posted on October 8, 2009 3:13:19 PM EDT by David Hammond