TOLERANCE FACTOR-BASED SECRET DECAY

Session-specific information stored to a cookie or other secure token can be selected and/or caused to vary over time, such that older copies will become less useful over time. Such an approach reduces the ability of entities obtaining a copy of the cookie from performing unauthorized tasks on a session. A cookie received with a request can contain a timestamp and an operation count for a session that may need to fall within an acceptable range of the current values in order for the request to be processed. A cookie returned with a response can be set to the correct value or incremented from the previous value based on various factors. The allowable bands can decrease with age of the session, and various parameter values such as a badness factor for a session can be updated continually based on the events for the session.