How can I set the Secure flag on an ASP.NET Session Cookie?

Question

In the <system.web> element, add the following element:

<httpCookies requireSSL="true" />

However, if you have a <forms> element in your system.web\authentication block, then this will override the setting in httpCookies, setting it back to the default false.

In that case, you need to add the requireSSL="true" attribute to the forms element as well.

So you will end up with:

<system.web>
    <authentication mode="Forms">
        <forms requireSSL="true">
            <!-- forms content -->
        </forms>
    </authentication>
</system.web>

See here and here for MSDN documentation of these elements.

There are two ways, one httpCookies element in web.config allows you to turn on requireSSL which only transmit all cookies including session in SSL only and also inside forms authentication, but if you turn on SSL on httpcookies you must also turn it on inside forms configuration too.

Edit for clarity: Put this in <system.web>

<httpCookies requireSSL="true" />

Things get messy quickly if you are talking about checked-in code in an enterprise environment. We've found that the best approach is to have the web.Release.config contain the following:

<system.web>
  <compilation xdt:Transform="RemoveAttributes(debug)" />
  <authentication>
      <forms xdt:Transform="Replace" timeout="20" requireSSL="true" />
  </authentication>
</system.web>

That way, developers are not affected (running in Debug), and only servers that get Release builds are requiring cookies to be SSL.

Building upon @Mark D's answer I would use web.config transforms to set all the various cookies to Secure. This includes setting anonymousIdentification cookieRequireSSL and httpCookies requireSSL.

To that end you'd setup your web.Release.config as:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<configuration xmlns:xdt="http://schemas.microsoft.com/XML-Document-Transform">
  <system.web>
    <httpCookies xdt:Transform="SetAttributes(httpOnlyCookies)" httpOnlyCookies="true" />
    <httpCookies xdt:Transform="SetAttributes(requireSSL)" requireSSL="true" />
    <anonymousIdentification xdt:Transform="SetAttributes(cookieRequireSSL)" cookieRequireSSL="true" /> 
  </system.web>
</configuration>

If you're using Roles and Forms Authentication with the ASP.NET Membership Provider (I know, it's ancient) you'll also want to set the roleManager cookieRequireSSL and the forms requireSSL attributes as secure too. If so, your web.release.config might look like this (included above plus new tags for membership API):

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<configuration xmlns:xdt="http://schemas.microsoft.com/XML-Document-Transform">
  <system.web>
    <httpCookies xdt:Transform="SetAttributes(httpOnlyCookies)" httpOnlyCookies="true" />
    <httpCookies xdt:Transform="SetAttributes(requireSSL)" requireSSL="true" />
    <anonymousIdentification xdt:Transform="SetAttributes(cookieRequireSSL)" cookieRequireSSL="true" /> 
    <roleManager xdt:Transform="SetAttributes(cookieRequireSSL)" cookieRequireSSL="true" />
    <authentication>
        <forms xdt:Transform="SetAttributes(requireSSL)" requireSSL="true" />
    </authentication>
  </system.web>
</configuration>

Background on web.config transforms here: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=125889

Obviously this goes beyond the original question of the OP but if you don't set them all to secure you can expect that a security scanning tool will notice and you'll see red flags appear on the report. Ask me how I know. :)

secure - This attribute tells the browser to only send the cookie if the request is being sent over a secure channel such as HTTPS. This will help protect the cookie from being passed over unencrypted requests. If the application can be accessed over both HTTP and HTTPS, then there is the potential that the cookie can be sent in clear text.