Hardening Cookies - Preventing Use of Stolen Cookies by Third Parties

In the modern day there exist many different ways that someone can steal your authentication cookies. Each of those ways needs to be mitigated through many different solutions. Would it not be better if instead of preventing theft, we could prevent the use of stolen cookies? This thesis therefore researches both existing and novel solutions that could be implemented to prevent stolen cookies from being used by third parties. The existing solutions are the Secure Cookie Scheme, One-Time Cookies, Origin-Bound Certificates, and the novel solutions, Fingerprinting and Challenge-Response. These solutions are compared through a conceptual analysis of their security benefits and a performance analysis. From these analyses is found that ideally the One-Time Cookie scheme should be used due to its security benefits and low performance cost. However due to lacking support by modern browsers, either the Secure Cookie Scheme or Fingerprinting, or both, could be used instead.Computer Science | Cyber Securit