Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by yoyonamite 1861 days ago
Isn't signing the session cookie to prevent cookie tampering? You can send a random string, but you would need to persist the random string somewhere in order to verify against it later
1 comments

The cookie value has to be stored in some sort of map\dictionary that links to the session data. If the cookie value is a random string, you don’t need to store any more data than you would with a hashed cookie value. Or maybe I’m misunderstanding your point?
ah, okay. I think I misunderstood. I was thinking about the case where the data is stored in the cookie itself (i.e. an encrypted cookie), and you would need a way to verify that the contents weren't altered. If it's storing a session id, then there isn't a reason to also sign it. Sounds like they conflated the two approaches.