Session hijacking can lead to:įraudulent banking transactions and purchasesĮxfiltration of the user’s personal information or their company’s sensitive dataĪlso read: Broken Authentication 101 Common session hijacking methods This means attackers getting a user’s session ID is as bad as attackers getting a user’s login credentials.Īn attacker with a stolen session ID has the same level of access to resources and functionalities as a legitimate authenticated user. Theft: The attacker acquires the session ID through techniques like session sniffing, session fixation, and cross-site scripting.Ī session ID for an authenticated session is considered a very strong authentication method. This is commonly done through three methods:īrute force: The attacker keeps trying session IDs until they are successful.Ĭalculation: If the session IDs are generated in a non-random manner, the attacker can calculate them. In session hijacking, an attacker gets hold of a valid user session to gain unauthorized access to the account. This is why session hijacking is also called cookie hijacking or cookie side-jacking. They are often stored in session cookies, URLs, and hidden forms on the website. Fig: How a session worksĪ session ID is a long alphanumeric string that is continually transmitted between the server and the client. When a session is destroyed, all associated user data is deleted from the allocated memory space. Sessions keep track of any user-specific parameters that are needed to ensure a good app experience. The session is usually active until the user logs out of the application, although some apps end the session after a period of user inactivity. When a user logs into an application, a new session is created and a session ID is assigned. This is why sessions are needed.Ī session is a sequence of interactions between two devices, usually a client and a server, that happen over a single connection. Entering usernames and passwords for every button click or web page view is not fun for anyone. Theoretically, this means a user would have to authenticate for every action they take on a particular application. Since HTTP is a stateless protocol, there is no connection between a request and other requests that were executed previously. To understand session hijacking, it’s important to know the basics of session management. This article will focus on session hijacking at the application layer. Session hijacking is a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack that can happen at both the application layer (Layer 7) as well as the network layer (Layer 3). Apart from credential theft, session hijacking is one of the most common ways in which attackers exploit poor authentication practices to steal money, data, and identities. If the original method of getting the session token can be repeated, this seems to further limit the usefulness of a timeout - a 5-minute window that can be repeated indefinitely is effectively not limited.Session hijacking is a cyberattack where adversaries impersonate an authenticated user after stealing their session ID. Once hijacked, the attacker will be able to prevent an idle timeout (via activity), and I would consider any successful session hijack a security breach anyway (unless you want to argue how much larger than zero seconds of access an attacker can have before it actually counts as an actual breach).
The most popular methods of session hijacking attacks are session-fixation, packet sniffing, xss and compromise via malware, but these are all real-time attacks on the current session. Trace session creation/destroy in order to analyse creation trend and try to detect anormal session number creation (application profiling phase in a attack).Prefer declarative definition of the session timeout in order to apply global timeout for all application sessions.Set session timeout to the minimal value possible depending on the context of the application.
Session timeout define action window time for a user thus this window represents, in the same time, the delay in which an attacker can try to steal and use a existing user session. OWASP recommends setting session timeouts to minimal value possible, to minimize the time an attacker has to hijack the session:
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