Tastypie not sending a cookie

Question

I am using Tastypie to make my API. I am using the following function to login

def signin(self, request, **kwargs):
        self.method_check(request, allowed=['post'])
        data = self.deserialize(request, request.body, format=request.META.get('CONTENT_TYPE', 'application/json'))
        username = data.get('username', '')
        password = data.get('password', '')
        try:
            user = User.objects.get(username=data.get('username', ''))
            if user.get_profile().status == 3 or user.get_profile().status == 4:
                return self.create_response(request, {'success': False, 'reason': 'Account Disabled or Closed' })
            user = authenticate(username=username, password=password)
            if user:
                if user.get_profile().status == 2:
                    return self.create_response(request, {'success': True,'is_verified':False })
                return self.create_response(request, {'success': True,'is_verified':True })
            else:
                return self.create_response(request, {'success': False, 'reason': 'Wrong Email or Password' })
        except User.DoesNotExist:
            return self.create_response(request, { 'success': False, 'reason':'Email not registered' })

But when I use jQuery to login with

<script type="text/javascript">
            $(document).ready(function() {
                $( "#signin" ).click(function() {
                    var username=$("#inputEmail1").val();
                    var password=$("#inputPassword1").val();
                    if (username.length == 0 || password.length == 0) {
                        alert('enter email and password to login.')
                    }else{
                        $.ajax({
                            type: "POST",
                            url: "/api/v1/user/signin/",
                            data: JSON.stringify({ 'username':username,'password':password }),
                            contentType: "application/json; charset=utf-8",
                            dataType: "json",
                            success: function(data, status, xhr){
                                $.cookie();
                                if (data.success){
                                    if (data.is_verified) {
                                        alert('Logged in and is_verified');
                                    }else{
                                        alert('Logged in but not verified');
                                    }
                                }else{
                                    alert('Incorrect username or password');
                                }
                            },
                            failure: function(errMsg) {
                                alert(errMsg);
                            }
                        });
                    };
                });
            })
        </script>

But when I try to fetch my cookie with $.cookie(); in firebug (using jquery-cookie) but it returns an empty object (Object {})

am I missing something? should I be adding something? This does work just fine with iOS. it somehow fetches the cookie and remembers the session. but not here.

Answer 1

Your signin method isn't setting any cookies, so there is no cookie that jQuery can access. I don't know how this is working for you on iOS (a leftover cookie from another session/manual login?) but unless you can see a Set-Cookie header when you sniff the traffic to iOS, the problem is in signin.

To set up a session cookie in Django, you need to add the value you want to save to request.session:

request.session['success'] = true
return self.create_response(request, {'success': True,'is_verified':False })

Incidentally you also have an information disclosure vulnerability in this code as it allows an attacker to determine if a username if valid on the system or not. Normally a login function should return the same error (in the same time) for an invalid username or an invalid password.