269751 - If any part of a cookie path is urlencoded, the cookie will not be sent. Cookies set for /~foo are not sent to /%7Efoo

Status: RESOLVED EXPIRED

(Core :: Networking: Cookies, defect)

Description

[Caskey L. Dickson]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040616
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OSX Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0

When accessing a page at the url http://www.example.com/~bob, if a cookie is set
like so: Set-Cookie=JSESSIONID=E9D0A80253FD6038D4AE6DC31BF3AED0; Path=/~bob; the
cookie will not be passed back on subsequent requests.  However, manually
replacing the encoded ~ with the literal, will cause the cookie to be sent.

Quite difficult to track down, quite confusing when the cookie manager was
showing the cookie being set, but the web server was not receiving any cookies
back, yet all other cookies appeared to be functioning correctly.

I've tested it with replacement of arbitrary parts of the URL with a url-escaped
equivalent (letters, numbers, ~, etc.), all with the same result.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Set cookie for URL prefix /~foo
2. Edit URL in location bar to replace *any* portion of the cookie path with
escaped equivalent
3. Load page, cookie will not be sent

Actual Results:  
Discovered using Tomcat's session management system with user app contexts. 
(Each ~user running in its own context.)

Comment 1

[Michiel van Leeuwen (email: mvl+moz@)]

well, the path _is_ different... I'm not sure if we should unescape it. maybe
there can be security issues due to charsets.
darin, ideas on this?

Comment 2

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This is an automated message, with ID "auto-resolve01".

This bug has had no comments for a long time. Statistically, we have found that
bug reports that have not been confirmed by a second user after three months are
highly unlikely to be the source of a fix to the code.

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Comment 3

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This bug has been automatically resolved after a period of inactivity (see above
comment). If anyone thinks this is incorrect, they should feel free to reopen it.