Testing for Session Fixation (OTG-SESS-003)

This is a draft of a section of the new Testing Guide v3

Brief Summary
When an application does not renew the cookie after a successful user authentication, it could be possible to find a session fixation vulnerability and force a user to utilize a cookie known by the attacker.

Description of the Issue
Session fixation vulnerabilities occur when: In the generic exploit of session fixation vulnerabilities, an attacker creates a new session on a web application and records the associated session identifier. The attacker then causes the victim to authenticate against the server using the same session identifier, giving the attacker access to the user's account through the active session.
 * A web application authenticates a user without first invalidating the existing session ID, thereby continuing to use the session ID already associated with the user.
 * An attacker is able to force a known session ID on a user so that, once the user authenticates, the attacker has access to the authenticated session.

Black Box testing and example
Testing for Session Fixation vulnerabilities: The first step is to access to the domain to test, for example www.example.com. If we request the following: GET www.example.com We will obtain the following answer: HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Wed, 14 Aug 2008 08:45:11 GMT Server: IBM_HTTP_Server Set-Cookie: JSESSIONID=0000d8eyYq3L0z2fgq10m4v-rt4:-1; Path=/; secure Cache-Control: no-cache="set-cookie,set-cookie2" Expires: Thu, 01 Dec 1994 16:00:00 GMT Keep-Alive: timeout=5, max=100 Connection: Keep-Alive Content-Type: text/html;charset=Cp1254 Content-Language: en-US We can notice that the application will set a new JSESSIONID=0000d8eyYq3L0z2fgq10m4v-rt4:-1 on the client browser. Now, if we authenticate on the application, for example sending the following POST HTTPS: POST https://www.example.com/authentication.php HTTP/1.1 Host: www.example.com User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; it; rv:1.8.1.16) Gecko/20080702 Firefox/2.0.0.16 Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5 Accept-Language: it-it,it;q=0.8,en-us;q=0.5,en;q=0.3 Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7 Keep-Alive: 300 Connection: keep-alive Referer: http://www.example.com Cookie: JSESSIONID=0000d8eyYq3L0z2fgq10m4v-rt4:-1 Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded Content-length: 57

Name=Meucci&wpPassword=secret!&wpLoginattempt=Log+in if we obtain an answer as the following: HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Thu, 14 Aug 2008 14:52:58 GMT Server: Apache/2.2.2 (Fedora) X-Powered-By: PHP/5.1.6 Content-language: en Cache-Control: private, must-revalidate, max-age=0 X-Content-Encoding: gzip Content-length: 4090 Connection: close Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8 ... HTML data ... we can understand that the application does not renew the user cookie after a successful authentication. Result Expected: Now we can try to inject a valid cookie to a user (using a social engineering trick) and verify that it is possible to hijack the user session.

Gray Box testing and example
Testing for Topic X vulnerabilities: Talk with developers and understand if they have implemented a session token renew after a user successful authentication. Result Expected: The application should always first invalidating the existing session ID before authenticating a user and if the authentication is successful, provide another sessionID.