[Angular] Protect The Session Id with https and http only

For the whole signup process. we need to

Hash the password to create a password digest

Store the user's info and password digest into db

Create a random sessionId to assoc with user

Set Session Id into cookie

async function createUserAndSession(res, credentials) {
// Create a password digest
const passwordDigest = await argon2.hash(credentials.password);
// Save into db
const user = db.createUser(credentials.email, passwordDigest);
// create random session id
const sessionId = await randomBytes(32).then(bytes => bytes.toString('hex'));
// link sessionId with user
sessionStore.createSession(sessionId, user);
// set sessionid into cookie
res.cookie('SESSIONID', sessionId);
// send back to UI
res.status(200).json({id: user.id, email: user.email});
}

-----

const util = require('util');
const crypto = require('crypto');

// convert a callback based code to promise based
export const randomBytes = util.promisify(
crypto.randomBytes
);

-----

import {Session} from './session';
import {User} from '../src/app/model/user';
class SessionStore {
private sessions: {[key: string]: Session} = {};

createSession(sessionId: string, user: User) {
this.sessions[sessionId] = new Session(sessionId, user);
}
}

// We want only global singleton
export const sessionStore = new SessionStore();

Now we have set the cookie, later, each request we send to the server, this cookie will be attached in the request header, we can confirm that:



But the problem is that, hacker can inject some script to get our cookie by using:

document.cookie

It enables the hacker to attack our site by just set cookie in his broswer, then in each reqest, the cookie will be sent to server, cookie is the only thing which server used to verfiy the user.

document.cookie = "......"

To protect that, we can make cookie can only be accessed by http, not JS:

// set sessionid into cookie
res.cookie('SESSIONID', sessionId, {
httpOnly: true, // js cannot access cookie
});

We can see that "HTTP" column was marked.

Second, we need to enable https protect.

To do that in server:

// set sessionid into cookie
res.cookie('SESSIONID', sessionId, {
httpOnly: true, // js cannot access cookie
secure: true // enable https only
});

We also need to adjust angular cli so that app run on https:

package.json:

"start": "ng serve --proxy-config ./proxy.json --ssl 1 --ssl-key key.pem --ssl-cert cert.pem",

// proxy.json

{
"/api": {
"target": "https://localhost:9000",
"secure": true
}
}

We can see that "Secure" column now is also marked.