Tips on Cookie Testing

These days Web Applications have become a thing, do you know a maximum of these sites save cookies.

Wondering what does cookie have to do with Web Applications? Because here I ain't referring to those chocolate cookies kept on the kitchen top :p rather I am talking about the small information which in the form of a text file is very cleverly stored on your Hard disk so that it can be accessed by the website later as and when needed by it.Broadly data like Email address, passwords, sessions tokens etc are saved.

The kind of information being stored in the cookie comes handy if the user revisits the website so that the server can be notified of the user's previous activity on the website. At times cookies are unavoidable for websites which have a huge database and also need compulsory logins.

Before get onto testing of Cookies let me give a brief about types of Cookies

1. Session Cookies - Cookies which are temporary come under this category by temporary Imean that they get erased after the user closes the browser. Such cookies can also have an Expiry time being set by the developer

2. Persistent Cookies - These cookies are like glue they would remain on the hard disk till the user removes them.

A few tips to keep in mind while testing for Cookie

1. Cookies should not be saving any kind of sensitive or personal data, and even if any personal data still needs to be saved make sure to encrypted the data before storing it.

2. Cookies being stored by one website should not be accessible to the other website, just the way your secrets cannot be accessed by some other person.

3. To make sure that the cookies are being stored differently for a different browser, for this you would need to perform cross browser tested.

4. Check how your application or website behaves if the cookies are disabled, if a major part of your application works on the basis of cookies then it would be interesting to see the way it would react if they have been disabled. For this, you would need to browse the whole website looking for any functionality breaks.

5. You know how to corrupt a cookie.? You just need to manually edit the cookie and add some vague value to it.

These were a just a few tips, multiple test cases can be written and performed.

THANKS