Designing coockie-less login for API - Wikitech-l

9 Aug 2007

I would like some feedback on the issue of how to allow API users to
prove who they are without using a cookie (some clients simply do not
support them), but instead pass all relevant information in the
URL/POST.

The login api module returns userID, userName, and userToken - all
necessary parts of a cookie. The client should be able to pass those
values in the URL, which should override the browser cookie (or lack
thereof), and instead resume the session specified.

The $_SESSION object gets initialized based on the cookie before the
php code starts. In order to resume the session, I could set
$_SESSION['wsUserID'], $_SESSION['wsUserName'],
$_SESSION['wsToken']
to the URL values, and set $wgUser = User::newFromSession() before any
other operations.

Does this introduce any security risks? Is there another way to solve this?

Thanks!