SIN 4USE OF MAGIC URLS, PREDICTABLE COOKIES, AND HIDDEN FORM FIELDS

OVERVIEW OF THE SIN

Imagine going to a web site to buy a car at any price you want! This could happen if the web site uses data from a web hidden form to determine the car price. Remember, there’s nothing stopping a user from looking at the source content, and then sending an “updated” form with a massively reduced price (using Perl, for example) back to the server. Hidden fields are not really hidden.

Another common problem is “Magic URLs”: many web-based applications carry authentication information or other important data in URLs. In some cases, this data should not be made public, because it can be used to hijack or manipulate a session. In other cases, Magic URLs are used ...

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