What is a Session Hijacking Attack?
On a website, cookies and Sessions are used to store information. Cookies are a tasty treat for malicious hackers. Once an attacker gets their hands on a session ID, they can get unauthorized access to a web application and fully impersonate a valid user.
The term “Session hijacking” refers to an attacker taking over a portion of a session and act as one of the benevolent participants.
Actually, there is more than one type of them.
How does session hijacking work?
Session hijacking happens when an intruder takes advantage of a compromised active session by hijacking or stealing the HTTP cookies used to maintain a session on most websites.
Another way is by predicting an active session to gain unauthorized access to information in a remote web server without detection as the intruder uses the credentials of the particular user.
Countermeasures to Session Hijacking
To keep your system strong against session hijack attack, follow these guidelines:
1. Use secure and well-tested session ID generation and management mechanisms tools available in popular frameworks.
2. End-to-end encryption between the user’s browser and the web server using a secure connection, which prevents unauthorized access to the session ID.
3. Change the session ID after the user logs in. There should be an automatic log off if a session ends in use, and the client should be required to re-authenticate using a different session ID.
4. Set the HttpOnly flag for session cookies.
5. Generate long and random session cookies, which reduces the chances of an adversary guessing or predicting what a session cookie could be.
How Codesealer helps to protect from Session Hijacking Attack?
Codesealer Enterprise generates a unique bootloader only valid for the ongoing session. The bootloader will tamper proof the secured session and make it impossible for an attacker to modify or take over the session.
The bootloaders are only valid for a few minutes – after this a new unique bootloader will be launched to secure the session. Should an attacker have made some progress in understanding the bootloader he/she needs to start all over since now bootloaders are being reused.
If that’s relevant – let’s have a chat or fill up a quick form and an expert from Codesealer team will shortly get in touch: https://codesealer.com/#contact
