Is either GET or POST more secure than the other?

Question

When comparing an HTTP GET to an HTTP POST, what are the differences from a security perspective? Is one of the choices inherently more secure than the other? If so, why?

Answer 1

You have no greater security provided because the variables are sent over HTTP POST than you have with variables sent over HTTP GET.

HTTP/1.1 provides us with a bunch of methods to send a request:

• OPTIONS
• GET
• HEAD
• POST
• PUT
• DELETE
• TRACE
• CONNECT

Lets suppose you have the following HTML document using GET:

    User: 

    Password: 

    
    

What does your browser ask? It asks this:

 GET /?username=swordfish&password=hunter2&extra=lolcatz HTTP/1.1
 Host: example.com
 Connection: keep-alive
 Accept: application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/ [...truncated]
 User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US) [...truncated]
 Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate,sdch
 Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.8
 Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.3

Now lets pretend we changed that request method to a POST:

 POST / HTTP/1.1
 Host: example.com
 Connection: keep-alive
 Content-Length: 49
 Cache-Control: max-age=0
 Origin: null
 Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
 Accept: application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/ [...truncated]
 User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; [...truncated]
 Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate,sdch
 Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.8
 Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.3

 username=swordfish&password=hunter2&extra=lolcatz

BOTH of these HTTP requests are:

• Not encrypted
• Included in both examples
• Can be evesdroped on, and subject to MITM attacks.
• Easily reproduced by third party, and script bots.

Many browsers do not support HTTP methods other than POST/GET.

Many browsers behaviors store the page address, but this doesn't mean you can ignore any of these other issues.

So to be specific:

Is one inherently more secure then another? I realize that POST doesn't expose information on the URL but is there any real value in that or is it just security through obscurity? What is the best practice here?

This is correct, because the software you're using to speak HTTP tends to store the request variables with one method but not another only prevents someone from looking at your browser history or some other naive attack from a 10 year old who thinks they understand h4x0r1ng, or scripts that check your history store. If you have a script that can check your history store, you could just as easily have one that checks your network traffic, so this entire security through obscurity is only providing obscurity to script kiddies and jealous girlfriends.

Over https, POST data is encoded, but could urls be sniffed by a 3rd party?

Here's how SSL works. Remember those two requests I sent above? Here's what they look like in SSL: (I changed the page to https://encrypted.google.com/ as example.com doesn't respond on SSL).

POST over SSL

q5XQP%RWCd2u#o/T9oiOyR2_YO?yo/3#tR_G7 2_RO8w?FoaObi)
oXpB_y?oO4q?`2o?O4G5D12Aovo?C@?/P/oOEQC5v?vai /%0Odo
QVw#6eoGXBF_o?/u0_F!_1a0A?Q b%TFyS@Or1SR/O/o/_@5o&_o
9q1/?q$7yOAXOD5sc$H`BECo1w/`4?)f!%geOOF/!/#Of_f&AEI#
yvv/wu_b5?/o d9O?VOVOFHwRO/pO/OSv_/8/9o6b0FGOH61O?ti
/i7b?!_o8u%RS/Doai%/Be/d4$0sv_%YD2_/EOAO/C?vv/%X!T?R
_o_2yoBP)orw7H_yQsXOhoVUo49itare#cA?/c)I7R?YCsg ??c'
(_!(0u)o4eIis/S8Oo8_BDueC?1uUO%ooOI_o8WaoO/ x?B?oO@&
Pw?os9Od!c?/$3bWWeIrd_?( `P_C?7_g5O(ob(go?&/ooRxR'u/
T/yO3dS&??hIOB/?/OI?$oH2_?c_?OsD//0/_s%r

GET over SSL

rV/O8ow1pc`?058/8OS_Qy/$7oSsU'qoo#vCbOO`vt?yFo_?EYif)
43`I/WOP_8oH0%3OqP_h/cBO&24?'?o_4`scooPSOVWYSV?H?pV!i
?78cU!_b5h'/b2coWD?/43Tu?153pI/9?R8!_Od"(//O_a#t8x?__
bb3D?05Dh/PrS6_/&5p@V f $)/xvxfgO'q@y&e&S0rB3D/Y_/fO?
_'woRbOV?_!yxSOdwo1G1?8d_p?4fo81VS3sAOvO/Db/br)f4fOxt
_Qs3EO/?2O/TOo_8p82FOt/hO?X_P3o"OVQO_?Ww_dr"'DxHwo//P
oEfGtt/_o)5RgoGqui&AXEq/oXv&//?%/6_?/x_OTgOEE%v (u(?/
t7DX1O8oD?fVObiooi'8)so?o??`o"FyVOByY_ Supo? /'i?Oi"4
tr'9/o_7too7q?c2Pv

(note: I converted the HEX to ASCII, some of it should obviously not be displayable)

The entire HTTP conversation is encrypted, the only visible portion of communication is on the TCP/IP layer (meaning the IP address and connection port information).

So let me make a big bold statement here. Your website is not provided greater security over one HTTP method than it is another, hackers and newbs all over the world know exactly how to do what I've just demonstrated here. If you want security, use SSL. Browsers tend to store history, it's recommended by RFC2616 9.1.1 to NOT use GET to perform an action, but to think that POST provides security is flatly wrong.

The only thing that POST is a security measure towards? Protection against your jealous ex flipping through your browser history. That's it. The rest of the world is logged into your account laughing at you.

To further demonstrate why POST isn't secure, Facebook uses POST requests all over the place, so how can software such as FireSheep exist?

Note that you may be attacked with CSRF even if you use HTTPS and your site does not contain XSS vulnerabilities. In short, this attack scenario assumes that the victim (the user of your site or service) is already logged in and has a proper cookie and then the victim's browser is requested to do something with your (supposedly secure) site. If you do not have protection against CSRF the attacker can still execute actions with the victims credentials. The attacker cannot see the server response because it will be transferred to the victim's browser but the damage is usually already done at that point.