HTTP & Cookies

HTTP

Two most important parts of a request:

How // HTTP method (verb - e.g. GET, POST)
What // Path (e.g. /contact or /contact?lang=fr)
- key value pair
https://www.canadapost.ca/trackweb/en#/search

Statelessness

HTTP does not remember you between requests - think Dory from Finding Nemo 🐠

In order to prompt the server to remember us, we need an identifier - think membership card at GoodLife. They have all of our user info in their system, but they give us a membership card to prompt their system into identifying us quickly.

Remembering state without cookies

How do we do this?

Example:

User sends GET request to /profile
Server has no clue who you are
Server sends redirect (302) to /login to client
Browser/user makes GET request to /login
Server renders login view (hypothetically login.ejs)
User fills out login form with valid credentials and clicks submit
Browser/user makes POST request to /login with form data as 'payload'
Server validates payload and finds the correct user object
Server redirects to /profile
User navigates to /, sending a GET request
Server has no idea who user is. Go back to step 3, lather, rinse, repeat.

Alternate approach

Steps 1-9 above
User navigates to /?username=mlaws, sending a GET request
Server looks up user based on username param
Server finds correct user object and responds with profile.ejs, and we make sure to interpolate ?username=mlaws to every link in our app (what a pain)

<% if (currentUser) { %>
  <a href="/?username=<%= currentUser.username %>">HOME</a>
<% } else { %>
  <a href="/login">LOGIN</a>
<% } %>

Problems with this approach:

Security:
- Very easy to brute force quess usernames and impersonate someone
- Sharing URLs means sharing your logged in state
Usability:
- Closing tab/window will log me out (unless I go back to URL with query string)

Enter: Cookies!

Instead of exposing data in query params in the URL, we can store data in a cookie.

The cookie is assumed to be stored by the client, who will send it with EVERY request.

This addresses most of the problems outlined above (with one glaring exception).

Demo 1: Language Switcher

--- BREAK

Demo 2: User Authenication

Security

Problems with our demo:

Devs/Ops have access to people's passwords (this happened on GSuite recently!) === BAD
- Hash passwords
  - password: '123' becomes: _sesson="aa104e-f8b4d64a8-d8177e84-6509439d0" in an MD5 hash, for example
  - Don't do this yourself, you aren't a cryptographer
Cookie is not encrypted, which opens us up to ~~Man~~Person in the Middle attacks (MITM) for all of our requests!
- We need HTTPS in order to fully encrypt our requests
- cookie-session node module encrypts and signs our cookies by default! Yay!

martinlaws/intro-to-http-and-cookies