Rails 4: How to decrypt rails 4 session cookie (Given the session key and secret)

Question

In Rails 3 session cookie can easily decoded with base64 decoding but in Rails 4 cookies are encoded as well as encrypted.

I want to know how to read rails 4 cookie which is encoded as well as encrypted(assuming we know the secret key base).

Thanks,

Stridulate

Answer 1

Rails 4 uses AES-256 to encrypt cookies with the key based on your app's secret_token_base.

Here's the general scheme of decrypting a session cookie:

1. calc your secret key
2. Base 64 decode the cookie value
3. split the decoded cookie value by '--', this will result in two parts, the first part is the encrypted data and the second is the initialization vector used by the encryption scheme. Base 64 decode each part independently.
4. decrypt the encrypted data by applying AES decryption with the secret key and the initialization vector.

I couldn't find a website to easily decrypt the messages (advice is welcome), programmatically it can be done like this:

secret = OpenSSL::PKCS5.pbkdf2_hmac_sha1(app_secret_token, 'encrypted cookie', 1000, 64)

encrypted_message = Base64.decode64(cookie_str)
cipher = OpenSSL::Cipher::Cipher.new('aes-256-cbc')
encrypted_data, iv = encrypted_message.split("--").map {|v| ::Base64.strict_decode64(v)}

cipher.decrypt
cipher.key = secret
cipher.iv  = iv

decrypted_data = cipher.update(encrypted_data)
decrypted_data << cipher.final

Marshal.load(decrypted_data)

Couple of notes:

• This code snippet is almost identical to the actual _decript method implementation in ActiveSupport::MessageEncryptor which is used by the ActionDispatch::Cookies middelware.

• This is all very much Rails 4 specific, from the ActionDispatch::Session::CookieJar:

  If you only have secret_token set, your cookies will be signed, but not encrypted. This means a user cannot alter their +user_id+ without knowing your app's secret key, but can easily read their +user_id+. This was the default for Rails 3 apps.

  If you have secret_key_base set, your cookies will be encrypted. This goes a step further than signed cookies in that encrypted cookies cannot be altered or read by users. This is the default starting in Rails 4.

Triptych

Hey! Is there a difference between 'encrypted cookie' (line 1) and cookie_str (line 3)? – Micronesia

Yes, there is a difference - the encrypted cookie string is used as is as the salt needed for the secret key generation (it might be possible to override, but this is the default salt), whereas the cookie_str is the actual cookie you wish to decrypt. If you're not familiar with the concept of salt have a look at: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_(cryptography) – Triptych