DACok

DACok stands for Decentralized Access Control for Cookies. It is a proposed framework intended to enhance the management of HTTP cookies by attaching cryptographic access policies to cookies and validating them against decentralized identifiers. The goal is to provide more granular consent and stronger integrity guarantees for cookie usage across sites.

Origin and community: The concept developed in privacy and security research circles in the early 2020s as part of broader efforts to curb cookie misuse and improve consent mechanisms. It has not been adopted as a formal standard by major standards bodies.

Technical overview: DACok envisions a cookie object containing a policy descriptor, a cryptographic signature, and a reference to a verifiable credential. A decentralized authorization layer issues policy proofs; clients present proofs when cookies are set or sent; servers verify the proofs against a trusted registry of DIDs. It leverages technologies such as decentralized identifiers (DIDs), verifiable credentials (VCs), and JSON Web Tokens.

Implementation and status: Several experimental implementations and browser extensions have demonstrated prototype flows. Because there is no formal standard, interoperability varies; practical deployments face browser compatibility, performance, and privacy considerations.

See also: Cookies, Web security, OAuth 2.0, JWT, Decentralized identifiers, Verifiable Credentials.

Limitations and considerations: DACok introduces infrastructural complexity and potential privacy trade-offs, such as increased metadata exposure and reliance on decentralized registries. Adoption would require coordination among browsers, servers, and identity providers.