Encrypted Cookie Store¶ ↑

encrypted-cookies has breaking changes in v1.0. Session cookies written with v0.3.* will no be able to be read by v1.0. Fix your version of encrypted-cookie-store to v0.3.2 if you don’t want to make the switch. See encrypted-cookies if you want more information about the change.

Encrypted cookie based session for Rails 3.

There are times when one must store things in a session that are not necessarily meant for anyone’s eyes. Database or memcache sessions should be used for highly confidential information, however, for information that is not mission critical but still could benefit from a little discretion, an encrypted session cookie might be a good option. EncryptedCookieStore is a drop in replacement for the built in ActionDispatch::Session::CookieStore. encrypted-cookie-store uses the encrypted-cookies gem to store the session information in an encrypted and signed cookie, instead of only using a signed cookie, as ActionDispatch::Session::CookieStore does.

Enabling an EncryptedCookieStore is easy. Just add the gem requirement to your Gemfile:

gem 'encrypted-cookie-store'

Then update then session store you are using in config/initializers/session_store.rb:

AppName::Application.config.session_store :encrypted_cookie_store, :key => '_app_name_session'

Writing and reading from the session is the same:

session[:tid_bit] = "of information"
session[:tid_bit] # => "of information"

This is provided as is. No guarantee is given for the security of the data written or read by this software. This has not been tested for cryptographic rigor. Use at your own discretion and risk. This should not be only level of security you use for your data. It uses ActiveSupport::MessageEncryptor to encrypt and ActiveSupport::MessageVerifier to sign the cookie values, so it is at best as secure as these two libraries. Be sure to keep your AppName::Application.config.secret_token safe and secret, as both of the above libraries use it in your Rails application.

Copyright © 2011 Les Fletcher

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