HTTP Remember me authentication

I'm trying to write a simple HTTP remember me authentication system for users.

My users could be represented as such

{
"email" : "foo@bar.com",
"password" : "8EC41F4334C1B9615F930270A4F8BBC2F5A2FCD3" // sha1 hash of password
}

So my idea is that I need to create a cookie, with indefinite (really long) expiration time, that will hold some type of information to enable me to fetch the user from the database, therefore logging the user in.

My first idea was to just simply store the email:password string as a cookie. I thought this would be good since nobody else can really generate that type of information other than the user itself, 开发者_如何学编程and I could retrieve the user quite easily by simply comparing the username and password based on what's in the database.

However then I thought this wasn't really good. It turns the password digest into, effectively, a second password that's stored in the clear and passed over the wire in every request.

So then I thought maybe I could generate a signature each time the user logs in, which would basically be a random hash that is stored directly in the user object in the database.

The user logs in, it generates this signature that is stored, and the cookie holds this signature. Whenever you access the website, the site checks which user has that particular signature and logs the user in. Logging out will effectively erase the cookie, and new logins will generate a new random signature.

Does this approach take into account any other vulnerabilities?

I know, I should probably use a library already made for this, but this is just simply an exercise in web-security.

This is essentially what most sites do when you log in. Yes, the cookie should hold a unique identifier for the user's "session". The cookie should be essentially random. Up to you whether to make it persistent across browser sessions.

Along with the cookie in your authentication DB, also store a timestamp of when the entry was created. Cookies older than N seconds should be considered invalid (set N to your taste). You can reset the timestamp each time the cookie is used so that idle sessions time out.

Note that the same user may want to have multiple sessions (do you ever log in to your Email account from both home and work?), so the concept here really is "session", not user.

Vulnerability point-of-view both are same! Cookie stealing and related mechanisms however browsers are smart enough now so you shouldn't worry about that.

Second approach is good in terms of privacy as well since it does not includes email address in the cookie. And it seems much more similar to like storing the sessionID which in your case you are generating a random hash and storing it in DB.

But i think it would be more wiser to use the first approach; you can add another layer to the digest and encrypt it with your some algo or private key; to be on safer side.