Microsoft's Michael Howard discusses the points of scrubbing secret data from memory, as well as expounding on mitigating cross-site scripting issues using the HttpOnly cookie extension.

As he noted on few security mailing lists: "During the Windows Security Push in Feb/Mar 2002, the Microsoft Internet Explorer team devised a method to reduce the risk of cookie-stealing attacks via XSS vulnerabilities. In a nutshell, if Internet Explorer 6.0 SP1 detects a cookie that has a trailing HttpOnly (case insensitive) it will return an empty string to the browser when accessed from script, such as by using document.cookie."

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Related items

• Article: The Cross Site Scripting FAQ (6 November 2002)
• Article: Cross Site Scripting "the security gap" (29 May 2002)
• Article: Evolution of Cross-Site Scripting Attacks (21 May 2002)