Decoding Forms Authentication Cookies With Mono

Lately, I’ve been experimenting with migrating web services from .NET on Windows to Mono on Ubuntu. While getting the code building and running in a VM was not terribly difficult, I soon found that authentication was a roadblock.

Our web services run across several subdomains. We’re moving towards using OAuth for everything, but many services still use Forms Authentication with a cookie that is shared across all subdomains. However, when I tried to use my cookie with a service running on Mono, I was treated as an unauthenticated user.

The first barrier to shared authentication between .NET and Mono is actually well-documented: the default cookie name under Mono is .MONOAUTH, rather than .ASPXAUTH. Upon discovering this, I quickly modified my Web.config to explicitly set the cookie to .ASPXAUTH…and nothing happened.

Another early discovery was that Mono base-64 encodes the cookie, while .NET uses base-16. Again, changing this (in my case, by using a custom build of Mono) had no effect—I was still treated as an unauthenticated user.

Eventually, after quite a bit of digging around, I learned that the binary format for .NET’s Forms Authentication cookie is undocumented, so Mono had to implement a reasonable—yet incompatible—alternative format. Furthermore, if you choose to encrypt the cookie, .NET adds an extra 28 bytes of padding to the cookie using an unspecified hash function—my best guess is that this has something to do with avoiding hash collision attacks.

In any case, I spent a lazy Saturday afternoon poking around with the format and arrived at a method of decoding the cookie, which is included here for your reading pleasure:

As you can see, it’s very proof-of-concepty, and it assumes specific encryption and signing algorithms, but it gets the job done and should be pretty easy to extend and generalize. Just drop this code into your Global.asax.cs, provide your favorite implementation of base-16 string to bytes, and you’re good to go.

Happy hacking!