The specification produced by the group was eventually published as RFC 2109 in February 1997. In February 1996, the working group identified third-party cookies as a considerable privacy threat. But the group, headed by Kristol himself and Lou Montulli, soon decided to use the Netscape specification as a starting point. In particular, the first discussions about a formal specification started in April 1995 on the Two alternative proposals for introducing state in HTTP transactions had been proposed by Brian Behlendorf and David Kristol respectively. The development of the formal cookie specifications was already ongoing. In the same year, cookies received a lot of media attention, especially because of potential privacy implications. The public learned about cookies after the Financial Times published an article about them on February 12, 1996. In particular, cookies were accepted by default, and users were not notified of their presence. The introduction of cookies was not widely known to the public at the time. Support for cookies was integrated with Internet Explorer in version 2, released in October 1995. Montulli applied for a patent for the cookie technology in 1995, which was granted in 1998. The first use of cookies (out of the labs) was checking whether visitors to the Netscape website had already visited the site. Version 0.9beta of Mosaic Netscape, released on October 13, 1994, supported cookies. Together with John Giannandrea, Montulli wrote the initial Netscape cookie specification the same year. Cookies provided a solution to the problem of reliably implementing a virtual shopping cart. MCI did not want its servers to have to retain partial transaction states, which led them to ask Netscape to find a way to store that state in each user's computer instead. Vint Cerf and John Klensin represented MCI in technical discussions with Netscape Communications. At the time, he was an employee of Netscape Communications, which was developing an e-commerce application for MCI. Magic cookies were already used in computing when computer programmer Lou Montulli had the idea of using them in web communications in June 1994. The term magic cookie itself derives from the fortune cookie, which is a cookie with an embedded message. It was derived from the term ' magic cookie', which is a packet of data a program receives and sends back unchanged, used by Unix programmers. The term 'cookie' was coined by web-browser programmer Lou Montulli. HTTP cookies share their name with a popular baked treat. 11.1 Authentication and session management.9.4 Cross-site scripting: proxy request.9.2 Publishing false sub-domain: DNS cache poisoning.European law requires that all websites targeting European Union member states gain ' informed consent' from users before storing non-essential cookies on their device.

Tracking cookies, and especially third-party tracking cookies, are commonly used as ways to compile long-term records of individuals' browsing histories - a potential privacy concern that prompted European and U.S. Security vulnerabilities may allow a cookie's data to be read by an attacker, used to gain access to user data, or used to gain access (with the user's credentials) to the website to which the cookie belongs (see cross-site scripting and cross-site request forgery for examples). The security of an authentication cookie generally depends on the security of the issuing website and the user's web browser, and on whether the cookie data is encrypted. Without the cookie, users would need to authenticate themselves by logging in on each page containing sensitive information that they wish to access.

They can also be used to save for subsequent use information that the user previously entered into form fields, such as names, addresses, passwords, and payment card numbers.Īuthentication cookies are commonly used by web servers to authenticate that a user is logged in, and with which account they are logged in. They enable web servers to store stateful information (such as items added in the shopping cart in an online store) on the user's device or to track the user's browsing activity (including clicking particular buttons, logging in, or recording which pages were visited in the past). Cookies are placed on the device used to access a website, and more than one cookie may be placed on a user's device during a session.Ĭookies serve useful and sometimes essential functions on the web. HTTP cookies (also called web cookies, Internet cookies, browser cookies, or simply cookies) are small blocks of data created by a web server while a user is browsing a website and placed on the user's computer or other device by the user's web browser.

Internet explorer cookie viewer