guardian/frontend — pull request #3314 by rtyley (2014-02-27 12:06:20+00:00)
Title: Use the more extensive User information from the GU_U cookie

Instead of providing user-data from the very minimal SC_GU_U cookie - which is a 'secure' cookie and thus less susceptible to eavesdropping - use the more extensive GU_U cookie, once it's been checked that the user-id matches on both cookies. This makes more user-data available to us without having to make an Identity API call.

Both cookies are signed, so they can't be faked, and SC_GU_U mitigates the danger of an attacker using a stolen cookie.