Currently, if a cookie cannot be decoded due to an invalid signature, the flash manager implementation returns null: https://github.com/innoq/spring-cookie/blob/78e8280bb6f1dcc20aa3843bceb75db36d5ac879/src/main/java/com/innoq/spring/cookie/flash/CookieFlashMapManager.java#L99 In some cases, instead of simply ignoring the invalid cookie, a custom behaviour should be triggered (e.g. throwing an exception).