secure cookies with cookie persistence?

No, there isn't. But cookie persistence can be re-implemented fairly easily with the universal persistence rule commands. You could then insert a cookie with whatever attributes you want, encrypt it, etc. Why don't you take a stab at writing the rule and I'll help out if you have problems?

We have also provided a way to do an inplace AES encryption/decryption of the cookies. Here is an example.

when HTTP_REQUEST {  
      if {[HTTP::cookie exists "cookieName"]} {  
        HTTP::cookie decrpt "cookieName" "passphrase"  
      }  
  }  
    
  when HTTP_RESPONSE {  
      if {[HTTP::cookie exists "cookieName"]} {  
         HTTP::cookie encrypt "cookieName" "passphrase"  
      }  
  }

Where the "passphrase" is a password based key. The encryption will effectively encrypt and base64 encode the cookie value for you.