Reading cookies

[dilbert]

I am not looking for coding help with what I discuss below, but how to read the existing vB4.x cookie.

I am developing a new section to my site and want to take advantage of the cookie that vB is creating. The site will be developed in Cold Fusion which is capable of reading the cookie, but I don't understand it (the cookie) very well. My concerns are around security. I presume it is fairly easy to edit the cookie so simply using the userid won't be enough.

The parts I see listed are:
lastvisit
lastactivity
userid
password
fbaccesstoken
fbprofilepicurl

The password doesn't match what is in the db. Aside from the userid is there another part to the cookie that I look up in the db to compare to the users cookie to authenticate them? Is there a way to compare the cookie password to the db password?

Thanks

--------------- Added 1316744063 at 1316744063 ---------------

Tada!

I searched and was able to piece it together.

This is what I am going to compare to the db password, this is cold fusion formatting.
#lCase(Hash(MyDataBase.password & 'COOKIE_SALT', "MD5"))#

COOKIE_SALT comes from includes/functions.php