Is there a way to read/decode the contents of a Rails 4 cookie/session into another language such as Javascript or PHP? How?
I have read that this is possible to do so with Rails 3 cookies, but with Rails 4 something about the 2-way encryption makes it difficult/not possible.
Currently, our app uses Rails 3, but I am looking to upgrade and the upgrade will upgrade to Rails 4, so I am trying to see how viable it is to be able to read cookie info from Rails 4 cookies.
it depends on which cookie you're talking about.
Session cookies cannot be read by javascript because they have the secure flag. You can hover see your cookies in the dev tools:
Regular cookies can be access in javascripts using document.cookie
I'm not familiar with PHP but if you make a request against a Rails server you will get a Set-Cookie header which will allow you to read the cookies being set by Rails. You can then decrypt the session cookie using the secret_key_base from your Rails app. Though this is highly discourage. I would using something like JWT http://jwt.io/ to share secret information between your Rails stack and your PHP stack. I.e. creating an endpoint on the Rails side that returns an encrypted response which the PHP server decrypts using a shared key.
For more info: http://guides.rubyonrails.org/security.html#session-storage
