Provides support for legacy clients when using cookies marked as SameSite=None; Secure in Laravel 5.8+
This package implements the first recommendation for handling incompatible clients outlined in this fantastic web.dev article by Rowan Merewood. If you're not sure why any of this matters or what is currently changing about the way browsers handle cookies' SameSite attribute, let me encourage you to read Rowan's thorough SameSite explainer.
In the past, a cookie without an explicit SameSite value could be written and read in a third-party context (e.g. your app in an iframe on another domain's page) without any restrictions from the browser. For security reasons, the most popular browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge) are now constraining their default cookie behavior so that cookies may only be read in a third-party context if they are marked as SameSite=None; Secure.
Ok, so we just need to update how we set those cookies, right? Not so fast. Unfortunately, marking cookies this way can make them incompatible with older browsers. And depending on your audience, a lot of people are still using older browsers.
This package employs a workaround to allow you to upgrade your app's cookies to meet current recommendations and still maintain compatibility with legacy browsers by including a fallback for all outgoing cookies marked SameSite=None; Secure. So if your app sets a cookie that looks like this:
appcookie=value; SameSite=None; Secure
This package will add a this fallback cookie in the response that gets sent back to the browser:
appcookie__ssn-fallback=value; Secure
When your app receives an incoming request, this package will inspect the cookies and promote any fallback cookies that don't already have a primary counterpart marked as SameSite=None; Secure.
Add the middleware to the top of the middleware property in Laravel so that this is the first middleware for every request entering the application:
protected $middleware = [
\KevinSmith\SameSiteNoneCompat\Laravel\SameSiteNoneMiddleware::class,
// all other middleware...
];Then update config/session.php to enable secure cookies and set the same_site config to 'none'. Note that it's important that both attributes are set correctly. Cookies marked as SameSite=None that do not specify Secure will not work.
To check that it's working as expected, inspect your cookies with Chrome and look for copies of all your cookies with the added suffix __ssn-fallback. And of course, you'll want to test this in all the browsers your audience uses to access your application.
Copyright 2020 Kevin Smith
Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at
http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.