Cookies-over-HTTP Bad

A Problem

Cookies sent over plaintext HTTP are visible to anyone on the network. This visibility exposes substantial amounts of data to network attackers (passive or active). We know, for example, that long-lived and stable cookies have enabled pervasive monitoring in the past (see Google's PREF cookie), and we know that HTTPS provides significant confidentiality protections against this kind of attack.

Ideally, browsers would mitigate these monitoring opportunities by making it more difficult to persistently track users via cookies sent over non-secure connections.

A Proposal

TL;DR: Expire cookies early rather than sending them over non-secure connections.

When building the Cookie header for an outgoing request to a non-secure URL, let's first check each cookies' creation date. If that date is older than some arbitrary cutoff (let's start with twelve months), let's not add the cookie to the outgoing Cookie header. Instead, let's delete the cookie. Over time, that cutoff could be reduced to something suitably small (say, a few days).

Let's also slightly modify the creation-time algorithm in step 17.3 of section 5.4 of RFC6265bis by persisting the creation time only for cookies whose value doesn't change:

3.  If the old-cookie's value is the same as the newly-created cookie's value, then update the
    creation-time of the newly-created cookie to match the creation-time of the old-cookie.

That's it.

Note that this proposal does not aim to prevent third-party tracking. It aims to set HTTPS as the minimum bar for state on the web (which, hopefully, we'd all agree is "powerful").

Hrm. Spell this out a bit?

Sure thing. Let's say that http://A.com embeds http://B.com, and their respective cookie jars look something like the following:

A.com
Name	Created
cookie1	2017-04-01
cookie2	2018-01-01

B.com
Name	Created
cookie3	2017-04-01
cookie4	2018-01-01

On 2018-03-01, the user loads http://A.com as a top-level document. All of its cookies are less than a year old, so they're all sent in the Cookie header. It embeds http://B.com. All of its cookies are likewise less than a year old, so they're included in the Cookie header as usual.

On 2018-04-02, the user loads http://A.com again. cookie1 is now older than a year, while cookie2 is younger. The request's Cookie header contains cookie2=value, and the browser deletes cookie1. It embeds http://B.com. Since cookie3 is now more than a year old, the browser deletes that cookies, and sends cookie4=value in the Cookie header.

FAQ

Won't this break things?

Cookies are somewhat fragile, and can be evicted at any time for reasons outside developers' control, so there is unlikely to be a high compatibility cost: users are not likely to see breakage. On the other hand, services that use long-lived non-secure cookies are likely to be unhappy, which is good. There are distinct risks to sending cookies over non-secure channels, especially when done at scale as part of an advertising network.

Developers responsible for affected services have a few options:

1. They can migrate to HTTPS, which is good for everyone.

2. They can adopt a system similar to DoubleClick's rotation of its ID, whose value is re-encrypted ~daily. Folks who need to maintain state in areas of the world where HTTPS is difficult to implement may be forced to stick with this option longer than they'd like.

3. They could migrate away from cookies as identifiers, towards something like localStorage, or, much worse, fingerprinting. Our goal should be to ensure that the friction involved with rebuilding their entire infrastructure to use a different identification mechanism will be higher than the pain introduced as we roll out this change.

4. They could trivially modify the cookie value as a perversion of the approach in #2 above. That is, Set-Cookie: name=[value]-1, followed by Set-Cookie: name=[value]-2, followed by Set-Cookie: name=[value]-3, and so on. If this is the route developers choose, browsers would be well-served to consider countermeasures. Given past deprecation experience, this doesn't seem likely: for example, only a very small number of sites switched away from <input type="password"> to something more esoteric when browsers started showing the "Not Secure" chip for password fields on non-secure pages.

The most worrisome group for unintentional breakage are Enterprisey intranet single-sign on servers. This doesn't seem terribly concerning, because it seems useful to encourage even enterprises to migrate to HTTPS for critical services like SSO. If it turns out that we ought to be more concerned about this, browsers could consider adding an enterprise policy to unblock old cookies for a given set of sites (though it seems valuable to avoid doing so if possible).

What's a reasonable cutoff point to start with?

An excellent question, which I think we'll need to answer with data. Chrome has collected metrics to measure the age of the oldest cookie in each same-site/cross-site request sent to a non-secure endpoint. As of December 2019, the percentile buckets break down as follows (average ages in ~days):

	Same-Site	Cross-Site
25%	0.7	5.2
50%	10.4	58
75%	93.9	207.4
95%	464.9	609.1
96%	522.1	661.9
97%	588.6	714.5
98%	677.1	754.5
99%	761.8	823.2
99.5%	848.9	956.2

Squinting a bit, it seems reasonable to start at somewhere around two years, which falls into a bucket that would have a one-time effect on ~2% of same-site requests, and ~3% of cross-site requests. It's a compromise between a short-enough lifetime to have a real impact on pervasive monitoring and non-secure tracking in general, while at the same time not breaking things like SSO on an ongoing basis (being forced to reauthenticate once a year doesn't seem like a massive burden).

Why base this on creation date rather than limiting expiration?

We could limit the expiration time for cookies set over HTTP (that's what Martin Thompson's ahead-of-its-time omnomnom proposal suggests). We'd have a hard time doing the same for cookies set over HTTPS, however, and those cookies can also be sent over HTTP if they lack the Secure attribute. Mozilla's research on the topic as well as Chrome's data on cookie types suggests that that happens far too often to be easily adjustable.

The approach proposed in this doc allows a request-time decision which targets only those cookies which would actually be sent over HTTP, which seems like a net that's just wide enough to catch the cookies we care about, while not attacking those which could be a problem, but aren't in practice.

Why base this on creation date rather than the Secure attribute?

Developers who are already serving their sites over HTTPS can avoid any impact of this proposal by annotating their cookies with the Secure attribute, which is a robust protection against being delivered or modified over HTTP. It would be lovely if more folks used that attribute: perhaps we should encourage them to do so by modifying this proposal to affect all cookies that lack that attribute?

That approach might be simpler to communicate to developers, and it would go beyond the current protections against pervasive monitoring to include a potential defense against DNS poisoning.

These are reasonable arguments. On the other hand, only something like 7.5% of cookies use the Secure attribute according to Chrome's data. Since we'd be expiring cookies regardless of the actual risk, and since something like 70% of users' navigations are to secure pages that the current proposal excludes, we'd end up affecting significantly more requests.

Still, this would be a more robust defense for users and developers. Browsers would be well-served to add more metrics to see what the impact of this kind of approach might look like if we take more things into account (HSTS with includeSubdomains and a sufficiently long lifetime obviates the needs for the Secure attribute, for example).

Doesn't this make users type passwords more often? Isn't that bad?

That would be bad. We should actively discourage folks from typing passwords into non-secure pages. Browsers are moving on this already by labeling sites as "Not Secure" in various ways when they contain password forms. I expect that trend to continue.

Open Questions

1. All or nothing? Is it better to treat a request's cookies as a monolithic set by deleting all of them if any cookie is expired due to age? That is, in the 2018-04-02 example above, should http://A.com receive no cookies at all?

   This is fairly draconian, but could be justified by noting that browsers don't understand cookies' intent, so ensuring a consistent state is important. Sending one cookie but not another might confuse a server in a dangerous way; as an extreme example, doSecurityChecks=1 might be set once a year, while sessionID might be set daily.

   Counterpoints in favor of the current proposal include:

   1. A server shouldn't be punished for old cookies it's forgotten about and isn't using.
   2. Cookies are fragile today, and older cookies will be expired first regardless.

2. Should we delete cookies? Or simply hide them? A variant of this proposal would not remove the cookies when they'd be sent over non-secure transport, but instead treat them as though they'd been marked as Secure, at least for the purposes of building the Cookie header. That approach raises a few questions which we discussed in an earlier version of this proposal. For example:

   1. Should we allow the server to overwrite the cookie we didn't send? (e.g. if name=value is older than the cutoff, would we accept Set-Cookie: name=other-value in the response?)

   2. Should we inform the server that there's a hidden cookie they're not getting (perhaps by sending the cookie name and a blanked-out value, like name=[value-omitted]).

3. Do we need to care deeply about bypasses? We discuss trivially bypassing this mechanism in #4 above. It seems that we could come up with heuristics to poke at that if it becomes common. Is that important? Should we care more than this document suggests that we should?

4. Should we special-case the cookie value "OPT_OUT"? It would be unfortunate indeed if removing old cookies meant that users who had opted out of interest-based advertising started being targeted again. Perhaps excluding the special value OPT_OUT (and asking advertisers to standardize on it?) is justifiable.

Feedback?

Blink's "Intent to Deprecate: Nonsecurely delivered cookies." thread is a good place to start.