Restricting access to cookies is essential for security in many web apps. For example, the session ID, the secret token used to identify a particular session, is typically stored in a cookie. Cookies have several important settings. Previously, I discussed the secure flag. This time, let’s dive into the cookie domain.
The cookie domain is an important security feature, probably even more important than the secure flag. It tells the browser that this cookie must only be sent to matching domains. Matching however, can happen in several ways. Perhaps domain is a bit of a misnomer: this can be any host name, like foobar.mxsasha.eu.
With this in mind, I did some digging into the exact workings of cookie domains, and was surprised to find this less straight forward than I had expected. And, it turns out Internet Explorer’s RFC-incompliant behaviour makes it safer to host your websites with a www-prefix, so www.mxsasha.eu instead of mxsasha.eu.
