Thursday, January 8, 2009

IE Developer Toolbar Incompatible with HttpOnly Cookies

Today I discovered that the Microsoft Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar is not able to "see" cookies marked as HttpOnly. This is illustrated in the figures below.
Essentially, this behavior tells me that the tool accesses the cookies using JavaScript (or client-side script of some sort). Since Microsoft originated the concept of HttpOnly, you would think their tool would be able to handle it. Unfortunately, it does not, and I'm running the latest version (1.00.2188.0).

The Firefox Web Developer Toolbar, a great extension created by Chris Pederick, suffers from no such problems. Below are some screen shots to illustrate. Although it wasn't created for web application security professionals, it is an unbelievably useful tool and I highly recommend it. I often use it during application assessments to manipulate cookies, inspect forms, view all JavaScript, switch form actions from POSTs to GETs, and much more.