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Sessionlock: securing web sessions against eavesdropping

Published: 21 April 2008 Publication History

Abstract

Typical web sessions can be hijacked easily by a network eavesdropper in attacks that have come to be designated "sidejacking." The rise of ubiquitous wireless networks, often unprotected at the transport layer, has significantly aggravated this problem. While SSL can protect against eavesdropping, its usability disadvantages often make it unsuitable when the data is not considered highly confidential. Most web-based email services, for example, use SSL only on their login page and are thus vulnerable to sidejacking.
We propose SessionLock, a simple approach to securing web sessions against eavesdropping without extending the use of SSL. SessionLock is easily implemented by web developers using only JavaScript and simple server-side logic. Its performance impact is negligible, and all major web browsers are supported. Interestingly, it is particularly easy to implement on single-page AJAX web applications, e.g. Gmail or Yahoo mail, with approximately 200 lines of JavaScript and 60 lines of server-side verification code.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    WWW '08: Proceedings of the 17th international conference on World Wide Web
    April 2008
    1326 pages
    ISBN:9781605580852
    DOI:10.1145/1367497
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 21 April 2008

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