MaverickBlogging | technology & art by G. S. McNamara

The Django Web application framework made to help you build websites fast offers a session storage mechanism that does not allow a visitor to fully terminate their session when they log out. Though not the default storage mechanism — as is the case with Ruby on Rails — it is an option. I found that at least Pinterest and Instagram use this vulnerable option to handle sessions on their websites and I demonstrate what the issue looks like to a normal Web user in my video:

Pinterest.com and Instagram.com both suffer from WASC-47, OWASP Top Ten A2, and CWE-613. The situation is especially bad given the lack of SSL protecting the transport of the permanent session cookie/token between their servers and your browser.

To identify additional high-profile Django-based websites that might use the vulnerable cookie-based session storage mechanism, here is a starting point: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1906795/what-are-some-famous-websites-built-in-django

Happy hacking! Contact me with questions.

When bringing attention to the session termination security issue present with Ruby on Rails’ CookieStore and Django’s cookie-based session storage mechanism, one of the common questions I get is “Who is using it?”

Well, I did some digging and have the following list of 1,897 websites for your review. These are Rails sites only (before version 4.0, and not including Rails sites that encrypt their cookie values). This is not an exhaustive list, and there is future work to be done in detecting remotely the use of Rails’ CookieStore with encrypted values as well as the presence of Django’s cookie-based storage mechanism.

This Insufficient Session Expiration weakness (WASC-47) is pretty common I found, and it is especially bad when the site does not use SSL. Many of the websites and tools we use store the session hash on the client side, including the applications Redmine, Zendesk, and Spiceworks.

If you don’t have access to the app’s source code, you may be able to figure out if the site you are visiting is using Rails’ CookieStore (before version 4.0 due to its encrypted cookie values) by checking for the string “BAh7″ at the beginning of the value of any of the cookies. A SHODAN search will reveal tens of thousands of these apps: www.shodanhq.com/search?q=BAh7*

Contact me if you are on the development team of any of the following websites and need help switching.

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