There is a header Max-Age that allows to specify the expiration time of a cookie. Unfortunately Internet Explorer 6, 7, 8 and probably later do not support Max-Age and requi
Just FYI, IE 11 supports Max-Age on cookies starting with version 11.0.15063.0.
I cannot find any documentation from Microsoft to report this, but during development we discovered our local version of IE was working, but customers was not. We narrowed it down to a difference in IE version and the Max-Age property on cookies.