[megous]

20 years of security:

sqlite3 cookies.sqlite 'SELECT name, value FROM moz_cookies WHERE isSecure AND isHttpOnly'

And that's a supposedly a master password protected browser. They can't even bother encrypting cookies. Don't be ridiculous.

[jkrejcha]

If the attacker can already execute code as you unrestricted, then you've kinda already lost.

Local storage isn't any better in this regard

[szmarczak]

That's why I wouldn't say the below.

> A lot of times local storage is much less secure

Without XSS, local storage is actually more secure. You don't have worry 'did I set up this right' because there is nothing to set up and CSRF is impossible to execute.

If you're still paranoid about XSS, CSP is your friend. Also check isTrusted on events.

[jkrejcha]

If you exclude all of the flaws of one implementation and include all of the flaws of another, then of course you can say one is better than the other. But that's not a fair comparison of implementations

CSRF has incredibly simple mitigations with cookies (SameSite=strict) and can even work across different path segments (although this tends to be uncommon) and has mitigations against XSS which local storage does not. XSS is bad in either case (CSPs aren't usually an effective mitigation for a variety of reasons[1]) but being able to outright steal the session token is worse than being able to use it in a potentially more limited context

[1]: Primarily that they're generally just not implemented and that a lot of web frameworks require incredibly loose CSPs up to and including unsafe-eval since they often need to dynamically load JS. In addition, this doesn't protect from supply chain attacks (JS that is injected as the result of it being loaded from another domain, like from a CDN for example).

[szmarczak]

> XSS which local storage does not [mitigate]

True. However it's not impossible to mitigate that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48563286

But arguably it's harder to do so.

> this doesn't protect from supply chain attacks

It's a separate attack vector. It's easily mitigated by having a one week back-off before upgrading. (and as I have said already, also affects binary executables)

> unsafe-eval

Technically speaking, nothing prevents you from shipping a JS-in-JS runtime that proxies objects and bypasses eval, which is just eval without eval.

[jkrejcha]

> True. However it's not impossible to mitigate that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48563286

It's not a perfect mitigation for session stealing, isn't available in all cases, requires custom code to implement, and also can in some cases completely break sessions (unless they have another place where it's stored)

> It's a separate attack vector. It's easily mitigated by having a one week back-off before upgrading. (and as I have said already, also affects binary executables)

A separate attack vector for the same problem. Which is also not mitigated by dependency back-off. If you load a 3rd party script into your site, you're relying on that 3rd party not getting compromised.

For example, if I have a page

<script src="https://example.com/accel.js" />

and if "accel.js" gets maliciously replaced, it can read all of the data out of local storage. No updates on your end required.

[szmarczak]

> isn't available in all cases

Which ones? Websites that ship no JavaScript? All browsers support this.

> can in some cases completely break sessions

Or you can just remove local storage from window and have it just for yourself, which seems what Discord is doing as well.

Attackers cannot use local storage because there is no local storage on the window object.

> A separate attack vector for the same problem

It's not exactly the same problem. The example you mentioned is a footgun because you don't vendor your dependencies. Deliberately giving someone else access to your website is an issue in itself.

[megous]

Not really. Difficulty of the attack matters. If your attack chain is silently doing an sql query over 20 year stable database format, vs something that may involve extraction of a master key from some hardened process, or tricking the user to reveal the master password to you, odds of you raising alarm in some anti-malware software raise significantly, because now you're not just reading a file, but you're using some deubgging APIs, etc., that common software does not use.

[jkrejcha]

The only difference between the cookie scenario and localstorage scenario here is that you're reading "storage/default/<domain>/ls/data.sqlite"

It's even conveniently grouped by domain

There's no magic hardening going on with local storage (session storage is the same here), it's still SQLite

Even if so, calling ReadProcessMemory/process_vm_readv on another process really doesn't raise alarms that significantly because there are a lot of legitimate programs that do so