security - how to set httponly and session cookie for java web application

Question

I am working on an XSS (cross site scripting) issue. My application runs on an Oracle Weblogic portal. We use Servlet version 2.5.

I have added the below 3 lines of code in the filter for setting httponly and secure cookies, and it is working fine.

String sessionid = req.getSession().getId();
res.setHeader("Set-Cookie", "JSESSIONID=" +  sessionid + ";HttpOnly");
res.setHeader("SET-COOKIE", "JSESSIONID=" + sessionid + "; secure");

The issue is when I logout and login immediately in the same browser. I am able to login, but after that, on the jsp pages I am getting a session timeout issue. We use weblogic related apis. The request.getuserprinical() api is returning null.. guess it is setting to null.

Please share any ideas.

If there are any other ways to set httponly or secure flag, please help.

Answer 1

Depending on the specifics of your web container, modifying container-managed session cookies within an app can cause the app server to toss the existing session and create a new one. I've observed this on Tomcat but it may be similar for Weblogic.

If you're using Servlets 3.0, you can actually instruct the app server to ensure that all session cookies are HttpOnly and Secure with the following fragments:

<session-config>
  <cookie-config>
    <secure>true</secure>
    <http-only>true</http-only>
  </cookie-config>
</session-config>

This is a better approach than manually hacking on the cookies with a filter.

FYI: I've also written a Java library that injects a number of security related response headers in Servlet based apps.