Delete-Cookie header??

Hey folks!!

A few months back, I suggested
<https://github.com/w3c/webappsec-clear-site-data/issues/82> adding a
granular way to delete cookies on the WebAppSec Clear-Site-Data repo, and
folks suggested the IETF may be a more appropriate venue.

Essentially, when operating large websites, one can find themselves facing
"cookie cruft" - cookies that no longer have backend logic that corresponds
with them. Such cookies may have been set at some point in the past with
far-reaching expiration dates, and are now causing useless cookie bloat at
best, or using up quotas at the expense of relevant cookies at worst
<https://blog.yoav.ws/posts/how_chromium_cookies_get_evicted/>.

The ability to delete duplicate/invalid cookies can also help defend
against certain attacks.

Deleting cookies is possible today by setting their expiry date to one in
the past
<https://blog.yoav.ws/posts/how_chromium_cookies_get_evicted/#:~:text=Otherwise%2C%20if%20you,aiming%20to%20delete.>,
but that requires one to know the "domain" and "path" parameters with which
they were set, which is not something that can be passively observed on the
server side (without jumping through a bunch of hoops and encode those in
the cookie name/value).

It'd be useful to have a way to clear specific cookie names regardless of
their path and domain.

On the issue
<https://github.com/w3c/webappsec-clear-site-data/issues/82#issuecomment-2216991247>
, +Anne van Kesteren <annevk@apple.com> suggested `Delete-Cookie: name1,
name2` as an example syntax, which seems simple enough and can get the job
done.

What do y'all think?

Cheers :)
Yoav

Received on Thursday, 31 October 2024 10:05:47 UTC