Web Application Security

Firesheep is a tool that highlights the weakness of unencrypted cookies. The use of unencrypted cookies is such a serious security vulnerability that they have led some security activists to exploit them on purpose, merely to demonstrate how insecure they really are.  Firesheep is a browser extension for the Firefox browser, which literally makes it point-and-click easy for someone to steal session IDs from certain popular social networking web sites and impersonate other users. Firesheep works by packet sniffing. It watches for the unencrypted session ID values stored in cookies to pass by on whatever section of Internet traffic it can see,captures those values, and presents them to the attacker within the attacker's web browser along with the victim's name. When the attacker double-clicks on a victim's name, Firesheep substitutes the stolen session ID value in place of its own,which allow the attacker to impersonate the victim. There is no way of knowing how many vic...