Given the session key and secret, how can we decrypt cookie-based sessions?

Rails
1

Hello all. I’ve got a question about how Rails handles cookie
encryption/decryption.

I’ve got this in my config/environment.rb

config.action_controller.session = {
:session_key => [some key],
:secret => [some secret]
}

And this in config/environment/production.rb et al.:

ActionController::Base.session_options[:session_domain] = [some
domain]

So far, so good – as long as all my Rails apps have the same
session_key and secret, and are on the same domain, they can all use
that same cookie.

However, a colleague now has a JSP application (on the same domain),
with which he’d like to read the cookies I have set.

So, given a secret and an encrypted cookie value, how would we decrypt
it to get the contents of that cookie?

(The docs seem to indicate this is one-way SHA1 encryption by default
– http://caboo.se/doc/classes/CGI/Session/CookieStore.html – but
then how would my Rails applications read the contents of a cookie
that is one-way encrypted?)

Thanks in advance for any tips/pointers/insight,
Joe

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2

So, given a secret and an encrypted cookie value, how would we decrypt
it to get the contents of that cookie?

(The docs seem to indicate this is one-way SHA1 encryption by default
–http://caboo.se/doc/classes/CGI/Session/CookieStore.html-- but
then how would my Rails applications read the contents of a cookie
that is one-way encrypted?)

session cookies aren’t encrypted (there is a cryptographic signature
to prevent tampering but the data isn’t encrypted).

The data is a base 64 encoded marshaled ruby object. in ruby it is
dead easy : strip off the signature (including and after the --) and
do
Marshal.load(ActiveSupport::Base64.decode64(blob_of_data)). You would
probably need to reimplement part of ruby’s marshalling algorithm to
decode the data (the marshal format is documented)

Fred.

Thanks in advance for any tips/pointers/insight,
Joe

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