Taking a Look into the Cookie Jar: A Comprehensive Study towards the Security of Web Cookies

Cookies play a vital role in our Internet browsing experience, enabling various functions on websites. However, their significance also extends to potential vulnerabilities, especially in the face of cyber-attacks like cross-site scripting. As we interact with websites daily, it remains uncertain how well these platforms protect user data from such attacks or how efficiently they address vulnerabilities. To address these concerns, our research endeavors to conduct a comprehensive measurement study across the entire Internet landscape. Our goal is to shed light on the potential security risks and the extent to which protective measures are deployed on websites. We developed a customized toolkit to scrape a multitude of websites on the Internet, this objective can be assessed by analyzing the security flags of cookies. Through this study on web cookies, we obtained a better understanding of the current state of web security and identified potential areas of improvement.