How do you set up use HttpOnly cookies in PHP

StackOverflow https://stackoverflow.com/questions/36877

Question

How can I set the cookies in my PHP apps as HttpOnly cookies?

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Solution

  • For your cookies, see this answer.
  • For PHP's own session cookie (PHPSESSID, by default), see @richie's answer

The setcookie() and setrawcookie() functions, introduced the httponly parameter, back in the dark ages of PHP 5.2.0, making this nice and easy. Simply set the 7th parameter to true, as per the syntax

Function syntax simplified for brevity

setcookie(    $name, $value, $expire, $path, $domain, $secure, $httponly )
setrawcookie( $name, $value, $expire, $path, $domain, $secure, $httponly )

Enter NULL for parameters you wish to remain as default. You may also want to consider if you should be setting the secure parameter.

It is also possible using the older, lower-level header() function:

header( "Set-Cookie: name=value; httpOnly" );

OTHER TIPS

For PHP's own session cookies on Apache:
add this to your Apache configuration or .htaccess

<IfModule php5_module>
    php_flag session.cookie_httponly on
</IfModule>

This can also be set within a script, as long as it is called before session_start().

ini_set( 'session.cookie_httponly', 1 );

Be aware that HttpOnly doesn't stop cross-site scripting; instead, it neutralizes one possible attack, and currently does that only on IE (FireFox exposes HttpOnly cookies in XmlHttpRequest, and Safari doesn't honor it at all). By all means, turn HttpOnly on, but don't drop even an hour of output filtering and fuzz testing in trade for it.

Note that PHP session cookies don't use httponly by default.

To do that:

$sess_name = session_name();
if (session_start()) {
    setcookie($sess_name, session_id(), null, '/', null, null, true);
}

A couple of items of note here:

  • You have to call session_name() before session_start()
  • This also sets the default path to '/', which is necessary for Opera but which PHP session cookies don't do by default either.
<?php
//None HttpOnly cookie:
setcookie("abc", "test", NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, FALSE); 

//HttpOnly cookie:
setcookie("abc", "test", NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, TRUE); 

?>

Source

Explanation here from Ilia... 5.2 only though

httpOnly cookie flag support in PHP 5.2

As stated in that article, you can set the header yourself in previous versions of PHP

header("Set-Cookie: hidden=value; httpOnly");

You can specify it in the set cookie function see the php manual

setcookie('Foo','Bar',0,'/', 'www.sample.com'  , FALSE, TRUE);

You can use this in a header file.

// setup session enviroment
ini_set('session.cookie_httponly',1);
ini_set('session.use_only_cookies',1);

This way all future session cookies will use httponly.

  • Updated.

The right syntax of the php_flag command is

php_flag  session.cookie_httponly On

And be aware, just first answer from server set the cookie and here (for example You can see the "HttpOnly" directive. So for testing delete cookies from browser after every testing request.

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