How many characters should a session key be for security? - security

Question

I am generating a session key to be stored in a cookie using the following function:
function getRandomKey($length=32) {
$string = '';
$characters = "0123456789ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz";
for ($i = 0; $i < $length; $i++) {
$string .= $characters[mt_rand(0, strlen($characters)-1)];
}
return $string;
}
If I were to generate a 1 digit key it would have:
26 lowercase + 26 uppercase + 0-10 = 62 options.
Therefore an 8 digit key would have 62^8 or 218,340,105,584,896 possible combinations.
1) Is there any rule of thumb on how many characters out I should go? The more the better, I know, but is 8 enough or should it be more like 32 characters, 64 etc.?
2) Are there any security concerns when using localStorage?
Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

These are two very different questions.
1) TL;DR: about 16 characters (case-sensitive) is ok for most purposes.
First, please if you can, avoid implementing session management. It is already done in many frameworks, including session id generation and more - use an existing, well-known implementation if you can, because it is not straightforward to get it right.
Now, it's all about entropy. You started out right by calculating the number of possible combinations. If you take log2 of that, you get how many bits of entropy that session id has. (Well, let's not go into entropy here...)
So one case-sensitive alphanumeric character ([a-zA-Z0-9]) has log2(62)=5.9542 bits of entropy, two characters two times more, and so on.
The time required for an attacker to guess a valid session id is:
(2^b + 1) / (2 * n * s)
Where 'b' is the available bits of entropy in the session id, 'n' is the number of guesses the attacker can make every second, and 's' is the number of valid session ids in the system.
In a large, distributed web application, potentially using a botnet, an attacker may be able to make n=100000 guesses a second, and there may be s=1 million valid session ids. You want the result to be several hundred years at the very least, say 300 (15768000000 seconds). (These are totally arbitrary values.)
This gives about b=70, so you need 70 bits of entropy. If each character has 5.9542 bits of entropy as discussed above, it gives about 12 for the required session id length, but you can just round it up to 16 to make sure. :)
As a rule of thumb, it is sometimes assumed that bits of entropy in a session id is half the length (in bits) of that session id. It is mostly a reasonable approximation without any calculation. :) Even more so, because sessuion ids are sometimes actual random numbers base64 or otherwise encoded. Different encodings usually give different results though.
Also make sure to use a cryptographic random number generator, otherwise entropy is much less. Note that mt_rand() is not cryptographically random, so the code in your question is vulnerable!
2) TL;DR Yes. (I suppose you mean using local storage for storing the session id.)
The best possible place to store a session id is a httpOnly, Secure cookie without an expiration (non-persistent), because Javascript cannot access it there (for example cross-site scripting doesn't affect a victim user's session id at least), and being non-persistent, it will be removed when the user closes the browser and will not be persisted to disk (well, mostly... but that's a long story).
If you use localStorage, any XSS will directly affect the session id, which is very valuable for an attacker. Also sessions will survive closing the browser, which is slightly unexpected - user sessuions might easily be hijacked on shared computers.
Note though that this depends on the use-case and the risk you want to take. While it would definitaly not be ok for a financial application where you can access and manage very sensitive data, it can be ok for less risky applications. You can also let the user decide ("remember me", in which case you put it into localStorage), but most users are not aware of the associated risk, so they can't make an informed decision.
Also note that sessionStorage is a little better, because the session id will be removed from the browser when it is closed, but it is still available to Javascript (XSS).