Context Relevant Issues

1
Context Relevant Issue

• Subject
• Web Engineering
• Presented by
• Umer Farooq
• Bs-IT- (3049)
• Evening -5th

2
Cookies Sessions
Limited storage space Practically unlimited space
Insecure storage client-side Reasonably securely stored server-side
User controlled No user control
3
Cookies and Sessions

• Cookies are useful for storing user info that
  should be retained from one page to the next.
  (Overcome the stateless nature of the web)
• Cookies are written to the clients hard drive.

4
Issues

• User can disable cookies in the browser
• Cookies may be viewed by other users
• Can only store 20 cookies max 4KB.
• Some browsers may display incorrectly unless all
  options are set in setcookie() (e.g expiration
  time, path)
• C\documents and settings\jceddia\cookies\jceddia
  _at_phpbuilder1.txt

5
Cookies

• Shortcomings of using cookies to keep data
• User may turn off cookies support.
• Data are kept with the browser
• Users using the same browser share the cookies.
• Limited number of cookies (20) per server/domain
  and limited size (4k bytes) per cookie
• Client can temper with cookies
• Modify cookie files, use JavaScript to
  create/modify cookies, etc.

6

• Notes
• Don't always rely on cookies as the client may
  have turned off cookies support.
• Don't store sensitive info in cookies