How to hack session variables in php

Connect and share knowledge within a single location that is structured and easy to search. Session in ASP. Can we hack a site that just stores the username as a session variable? One thing you could do when you authenticate the user and store their name in Session, would be to also store some other information about them. Generally you hijack a session by stealing the session cookie and recreating it on another machine. However in order to do this the web site must be vulnerable to Cross Site Scripting which you can mitigate against with Server.

HtmlEncode when you echo user input back. If if you do end up vulnerable the ASP. NET session cookie is marked as HTTP Only, which means, if a browser supports it, it is not accessible to access from client side scripts although Safari ignores this setting. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group.

Create a free Team What is Teams? Collectives on Stack Overflow. Learn more. Hacking session variables in Asp. NET Ask Question. Asked 12 years, 7 months ago.

Tip: If you need a permanent storage, you may want to store the data in a database. In this page, we start a new PHP session and set some session variables:. Before any HTML tags. Another way to show all the session variable values for a user session is to run the following code:. How does it work?

How does it know it's me? Most sessions set a user-key on the user's computer that looks something like this: cf34ert8dede5ae4f3a7e Then, when a session is opened on another page, it scans the computer for a user-key. If there is a match, it accesses that session, if not, it starts a new session. We just launched W3Schools videos. It only takes a minute to sign up. Connect and share knowledge within a single location that is structured and easy to search. I have a site where a user can create an account and log in.

When the user logs in, after I validate the user's password and username, I give them a PHP session variable containing their username. That is how they access features on my site such as creating a blog post and changing their user bio.

Can someone wanting to get on my site through another person's account fake a session variable containing the username of the user? If so, how can they do this? And are there any ways to prevent this? The session ID is the only thing transferred back and forward between the client and the server. Therefore, unless the server is hacked or has a server-side bug, the client cannot change the session data directly.

In your case, the username in the session variable seems to be part of the session ID or it's replacement this is a little unclear.

That does not mean that the system does not have to ensure that only the valid client knows the session ID, because that's what links the client to the specific session. This prevents session fixation. The PHP sessionid issued after a successful login is generated on the server-side and only contain random data. The sessionid is sent as a cookie, and is included in every subsequent request from the client.

The session data is stored on the server, and the session id is used to reference this data for each request. The PHP sessionid is considered secure. This has not always been the case.