Asp – If you don’t set an expiration for a cookie, will it be lost when the browser is closed

I think you are attacking it from the wrong angle by trying to encode all posted data.

Note that a "<" could also come from other outside sources, like a database field, a configuration, a file, a feed and so on.

Furthermore, "<" is not inherently dangerous. It's only dangerous in a specific context: when writing strings that haven't been encoded to HTML output (because of XSS).

In other contexts different sub-strings are dangerous, for example, if you write an user-provided URL into a link, the sub-string "javascript:" may be dangerous. The single quote character on the other hand is dangerous when interpolating strings in SQL queries, but perfectly safe if it is a part of a name submitted from a form or read from a database field.

The bottom line is: you can't filter random input for dangerous characters, because any character may be dangerous under the right circumstances. You should encode at the point where some specific characters may become dangerous because they cross into a different sub-language where they have special meaning. When you write a string to HTML, you should encode characters that have special meaning in HTML, using Server.HtmlEncode. If you pass a string to a dynamic SQL statement, you should encode different characters (or better, let the framework do it for you by using prepared statements or the like)..

When you are sure you HTML-encode everywhere you pass strings to HTML, then set ValidateRequest="false" in the <%@ Page ... %> directive in your .aspx file(s).

In .NET 4 you may need to do a little more. Sometimes it's necessary to also add <httpRuntime requestValidationMode="2.0" /> to web.config (reference).

Although there is the RFC 2965 (Set-Cookie2, had already obsoleted RFC 2109) that should define the cookie nowadays, most browsers don’t fully support that but just comply to the original specification by Netscape.

There is a distinction between the Domain attribute value and the effective domain: the former is taken from the Set-Cookie header field and the latter is the interpretation of that attribute value. According to the RFC 2965, the following should apply:

• If the Set-Cookie header field does not have a Domain attribute, the effective domain is the domain of the request.
• If there is a Domain attribute present, its value will be used as effective domain (if the value does not start with a . it will be added by the client).

Having the effective domain it must also domain-match the current requested domain for being set; otherwise the cookie will be revised. The same rule applies for choosing the cookies to be sent in a request.

Mapping this knowledge onto your questions, the following should apply:

• Cookie with Domain=.example.com will be available for www.example.com
• Cookie with Domain=.example.com will be available for example.com
• Cookie with Domain=example.com will be converted to .example.com and thus will also be available for www.example.com
• Cookie with Domain=example.com will not be available for anotherexample.com
• www.example.com will be able to set cookie for example.com
• www.example.com will not be able to set cookie for www2.example.com
• www.example.com will not be able to set cookie for .com

And to set and read a cookie for/by www.example.com and example.com, set it for .www.example.com and .example.com respectively. But the first (.www.example.com) will only be accessible for other domains below that domain (e.g. foo.www.example.com or bar.www.example.com) where .example.com can also be accessed by any other domain below example.com (e.g. foo.example.com or bar.example.com).