Python – Flask sessions, where are the cookies stored

cookiesflaskpythonsession

I'm learning flask and want to understand how sessions work.
Apparently the server stores a signed cookie on the client browser.
I have done this process using

sessions['mycookie'] = 'mycookievalue'

But I'm unable to find the cookie on the browser. I normally list cookies on the browser using chrome developer tools and running the command:

document.cookie

This works when I set a cookie but nothing comes up when I set it through sessions.

Best Answer

The Flask session cookie has the httponly flag set, making it invisible from JavaScript.

It is otherwise a normal, regular cookie so it is still stored in the browser cookie store; you should still be able to see it in your browser's developer tools.

You can set the SESSION_COOKIE_HTTPONLY option to False if you want to be able to access the cookie value from JavaScript code. From the Builtin Configuration Values section:

SESSION_COOKIE_HTTPONLY
controls if the cookie should be set with the httponly flag. Defaults to True.

The cookie contains all your session data, serialised using JSON (with tagging support for a wider range of Python types), together with a cryptographic signature that makes sure the data can't be tampered with securely.

If you disable the httponly protection, any JS code could still decode and read all your session data. Even if it can't change those values, that could still be very interesting to malicious code. Imagine a XSS bug in your site being made worse because the JS code could just read a CSRF token used to protect a web form straight from the session.

What's happening

As it is, Internet Explorer gives lower level of trust to IFRAME pages (IE calls this "third-party" content). If the page inside the IFRAME doesn't have a Privacy Policy, its cookies are blocked (which is indicated by the eye icon in status bar, when you click on it, it shows you a list of blocked URLs).

_{(source: piskvor.org)}

In this case, when cookies are blocked, session identifier is not sent, and the target script throws a 'session not found' error.

(I've tried setting the session identifier into the form and loading it from POST variables. This would have worked, but for political reasons I couldn't do that.)

It is possible to make the page inside the IFRAME more trusted: if the inner page sends a P3P header with a privacy policy that is acceptable to IE, the cookies will be accepted.

How to solve it

Create a p3p policy

A good starting point is the W3C tutorial. I've gone through it, downloaded the IBM Privacy Policy Editor and there I created a representation of the privacy policy and gave it a name to reference it by (here it was policy1).

NOTE: at this point, you actually need to find out if your site has a privacy policy, and if not, create it - whether it collects user data, what kind of data, what it does with it, who has access to it, etc. You need to find this information and think about it. Just slapping together a few tags will not cut it. This step cannot be done purely in software, and may be highly political (e.g. "should we sell our click statistics?").

(e.g. "the site is operated by ACME Ltd., it uses anonymous per-session identifiers for its operation, collects user data only if explicitly permitted and only for the following purposes, the data is stored only as long as necessary, only our company has access to it, etc. etc.").

(When editing with this tool, it's possible to view errors/omissions in the policy. Also very useful is the tab "HTML Policy": at the bottom, it has a "Policy Evaluation" - a quick check if the policy will be blocked by IE's default settings)

The Editor exports to a .p3p file, which is an XML representation of the above policy. Also, it can export a "compact version" of this policy.

Link to the policy

Then a Policy Reference file (http://example.com/w3c/p3p.xml) was needed (an index of privacy policies the site uses):

<META>
  <POLICY-REFERENCES>
    <POLICY-REF about="/w3c/example-com.p3p#policy1">
      <INCLUDE>/</INCLUDE>
      <COOKIE-INCLUDE/>
    </POLICY-REF>
  </POLICY-REFERENCES>
</META>

The <INCLUDE> shows all URIs that will use this policy (in my case, the whole site). The policy file I've exported from the Editor was uploaded to http://example.com/w3c/example-com.p3p

Send the compact header with responses

I've set the webserver at example.com to send the compact header with responses, like this:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK 
P3P: policyref="/w3c/p3p.xml", CP="IDC DSP COR IVAi IVDi OUR TST"
// ... other headers and content

policyref is a relative URI to the Policy Reference file (which in turn references the privacy policies), CP is the compact policy representation. Note that the combination of P3P headers in the example may not be applicable on your specific website; your P3P headers MUST truthfully represent your own privacy policy!

Profit!

In this configuration, the Evil Eye does not appear, the cookies are saved even in the IFRAME, and the application works.

Edit: What NOT to do, unless you like defending from lawsuits

Several people have suggested "just slap some tags into your P3P header, until the Evil Eye gives up".

The tags are not only a bunch of bits, they have real world meanings, and their use gives you real world responsibilities!

For example, pretending that you never collect user data might make the browser happy, but if you actually collect user data, the P3P is conflicting with reality. Plain and simple, you are purposefully lying to your users, and that might be criminal behavior in some countries. As in, "go to jail, do not collect $200".

A few examples (see p3pwriter for the full set of tags):

NOI : "Web Site does not collected identified data." (as soon as there's any customization, a login, or any data collection (***** Analytics, anyone?), you must acknowledge it in your P3P)
STP: Information is retained to meet the stated purpose. This requires information to be discarded at the earliest time possible. Sites MUST have a retention policy that establishes a destruction time table. The retention policy MUST be included in or linked from the site's human-readable privacy policy." (so if you send STP but don't have a retention policy, you may be committing fraud. How cool is that? Not at all.)

I'm not a lawyer, but I'm not willing to go to court to see if the P3P header is really legally binding or if you can promise your users anything without actually willing to honor your promises.

How do browser cookie domains work

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).