Cam Murphy

Senior Cloud Engineer. I live in Chicago with my girlfriend and our cats. For work I do a little bit of networking, security, and programming.

I know the browser stores cookies on your machine. I also know that websites can set and check them. However, I was not sure how and where they are stored. It turns out cookies for Firefox are stored in a cookies.sqlite database in the browser’s profile folder. The profile folder can be found by typing about:profiles into the Firefox address bar.

Checking the Cookie Jar
I wanted to see what this database of cookies looked like, so I downloaded a DB Client for SQLite. I tried just opening the cookies.sqlite file in SQLite Browser but ran into an error:

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It looks like the Firefox process has a lock on it, and I could not read from it. I had to copy the file to a different folder and then I was able to open and read the contents.

Examining the database file, there are around 3,000 entries for cookies! I found only one cookie attributed to my domain of *.cammurphy.com and that was the cf_clearence cookie, which I guess means Cloudflare is sufficiently happy I am not a robot.

Adding Cookies!

To add a cookie to www.cammurphy.com I added the following simple JavaScript code:

var now = new Date();
var oneYear = new Date(now);
oneYear.setFullYear(now.getFullYear() + 1);
document.cookie = "cookie=welcomeToCamsWebsite; expires=" +  oneYear.toUTCString() + "; path=/";

Checking the cookie in the browser, I see it:

Image

I also see it querying cookies.sqlite:

Image

Overall, it is a pretty simple process to set and check a simple cookie. I think it is more interesting to see how you can use them and how to secure them. That will be in later posts.

References

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Guides/Cookies

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Document/cookie

Updated: