Before I start here: this is a duplicate from another post at serverFault.com ("https://serverfault.com/questions/1009946/hcl-domino-how-to-drop-users-logged-in-with-ltpatoken"); I first felt that would be the place to ask, but since I never got an answer I decided to try once more here.
We are running a Domino server (V 10.0.1 FP3) hosting a number of Xpages applications. Apart from the admins all users are accessing those application through http only (i.e., no nrpc / Notes client access).
The users' person data are synched from AD to Domino via TDI. Authentication is done against the company's AD, this is configured through a Web SSO config document. There however is no complete SSO set up so that users will have to authenticate when first accessing the applications through their browsers.
For application related reasons we set the Ltpa token's expiration time to a rather high value (if necessary I am willing to discuss the reasons for that in a separate thread, but this is not really related to this question here).
Here's a screenshot of the config page:
Domino's http task is restarted every morning at 2:30 through a program document issueing
restart task http
Some observations from that server:
an http restart apparently doesn't invalidate the tokens, i.e. once the http is back up a user who kept the browser open can easily continue accessing the applications without having to re-authenticate (within the expiration time frame). (EDIT): This appears to be true even if the entire domino server is restarted
if users simply close their browsers instead of correctly logging off the tokens at the server side aren't removed (again, as long as they don't expire). If then the user logs on again a 2nd /3rd / 4th token for this user appears server-side
there's apparently no direct way to drop a user session, neither through a simple drop console command nor through admin client actions
Question:
are there ways to drop those user sessions from the server side and/or truly invalidate the tokens?
Basically, what I'm looking for is a way to make sure that users have to re-authenticate every morning. As http is restarted at 2:30 every morning (see above) it would be ideal to also do this at or around that time.
For completeness:
for this server we use an Internet site document which is setup like this:
Any hint is very welcome.
Related
I have a FastAPI backend service that serves user requests based on their credentials. When I have 2 users logged in, the backend service switches to process the 2nd (most recent) user's requests and drops the first user's. To be more clear, for example, the service is an async one that fetches DB records related to the logged in user only.
I have tried the sessions option as described here but it seems not to work, though I did not get any errors. I have the app in localhost and am using Chrome browser's 2 separate tabs in Incognito mode, to test this. In fact, I tried two different browsers as well, but no luck.
What could be wrong ? Not sure if I am wrong with my fundamental understanding of concurrent user handling concepts...
What is the common(best practice) way of allowing a user to sign in from a Windows desktop application. Some examples of what I mean are Dropbox or Google Picasa. You sign in with your credentials and then the software is permanently signed in.
I assume the communication takes place over HTTPS. Does the client store the credentials to be sent with requests or is there some sort of token generated? Can anyone point me to some resources on how this should be handled?
Logging into a website normally creates a session at the server. The server then has to identify subsequent requests by the session. Typically, there is one of the following two solutions applied:
Session cookie, storing a session identifier
URL rewriting, where the session identifier is appended to every link in the html source
Which approach is taken is site dependent, so if you are writing a general 'for all sites' client, you might have to implement both.
In the former case, your application will have to handle the session cookies, in the second case, your application has either nothing to do - if it caches the html response - or will have to emulate the url rewriting itself.
In both cases be aware that the session will expire at server side after a certain period without any activity, so you might be required to generate such.
I have been puzzling over this and can't think of an good way of doing this. I am developing a website that would require the user to log in to use the system. I'm thinking of using ASP.NET MVC 4's built in authentication. That isn't much of a problem.
The user would be able to use tools on another server (our server would authenticate him and tell the other website, he is good to go, these messages are passed via HTTPS using XML). The other server, require us to create an authentication token for the user to use when the messages are passed between us.
We need to keep the token in our database to authenticate for every request/response with the other server. Which means that this "token table" knows nothing about the forms authentication time out on our server and vice-verse.
Now the problem, let's say the user uses the other server's tools. He would be on the other server for a long time, this would cause the authentication on our server to log him out, since there doesn't seem to be any perceived activity. The other server will not log him out since we are manually maintaining the token. This would be a troublesome for the user, because now, if he needs to use our service, he'll have to log in again even though he was "online" all the time.
Is there a way to "sync" the 2 authentications? At first I was thinking of getting our server to look up the "token table" (instead of using the built in authentication) so that if the last activity was x ago, the user will be required to log in again, this would solve the untimely logging out from our server. But I'm worried about the security implications.
What would be the best way to do this?
Thank you.
Desmond
If I've understood you correctly you are using Forms Authentication in an MVC4 application to authenticate users, but users will also use another web service located on a different server and so while they are using this other server you don't want the MVC4 application's authentication (for the user) to timeout. Is that correct?
If so, one idea that comes to mind is that your MVC4 application could have an API to the external world that would take in a username and use RenewTicketIfOld() to refresh the timer associated with the ticket. You could do this via the other web server making an HTTP request or by simply placing some AJAX on the page to call the API on every page.
There are, of course, security concerns with this method that you would need to consider. Without knowing more about your situation I'm not sure what solution would be best.
I've been getting into the (relatively) new Web API that shipped with VS 2012 / MVC 4 / .NET 4.5, and have a custom message handler that handles authentication up and running. I also managed to hook it up to an old .NET 2.0 Membership Provider which was great.
I am now tackling the "authenticate with every HTTP request" issue by using a token in the HTTP request header, which I am comfortable with doing.
Now, for mobile apps when a user opens the app I show a login screen the first time, and don't show it again unless for any reason I get the "Unauthorized" message back. But for my web browser based projects I log in once and the browser (as long as it remains open) will remain authenticated.
What's the best way of forcing a time-out with this sort of authentication? I would prefer to log out based on inactivity, if anyone has done this. This one has me a bit stumped, so any guidance is appreciated :-)
Thanks!
There are two idle timeouts you need to consider.
Server Side idle timeout which expires to token you referred to
Client Side (mobile app) idle timeout which directs the user to re-enter credentials
For #1, You'd have to keep track of which tokens are active, or when they expire, etc... there are multiple ways to do this. How I'd recommend you implement it depends on if your deploying to IIS or Azure and if you'll be scaling out. In general though you want a central location where this information is stored. A DB works, but is relatively slow. Session State could work in Azure as the Session State can be shared across servers via App Fabric, but in IIS, you'd have to use an additinal component to share session state across the servers. Same holds true if you use the HttpRuntimeCache in .NET
It should also be noted that doing such checking server-side is critical so as to prevent someone from hijacking the token you refer to depending on how you ultimately decide to implement things.
For #2, What we did in our iOS app was keep track of the idle timeout. Each time user give input of any kind (e.g. BeginTouch event) in the app, we stop our idle timer and restart it. The timer is configure to take the user to the login screen should the timer fire. This same sort of thing should work well in Android, WP7, etc.
I have an asp .net webforms app that uses forms authentication. For a small number of users we have a problem where they log in, they navigate to a couple of pages and then they are asked to log in again. Once logged in for a second time they seem to be able to stay logged in as expected. They shouldn't be asked to login the second time.
This is a single server, no web farms, nothing tricky.
This only happens to a few users, but it does seem to be all users from the same building. I am unable to replicate this and at this point might even start to deny that t was happening if one of our trainers hadn't watched it happen to a couple of customers.
Has anyone else seen anything like this?
I am also seeing a lot of "Membership credential verification failed." errors in the event log. This may be related, but all the googling I've done seems to point to web farms and the like, not a single server.
UPDATE
There is no proxy server, the IIS server and the browser (IE8) are both on the same machine.
The AV software installed is Symantec Endpoint, on one machine, on the other the user didn't have any AV at all (AV Fail!).
The browser is IE 8 with no frills, not a single addin that didn't come with the default installation.
Both session and user login time-outs are set to 30 mins and the problem happens within 1 min of the user logging on.
Logging shows the user to only have one IP address.
I have tried the sessionMode in all it's variations, this doesn't seem to make any difference.
Something has to be causing ASP.NET to think these users have new sessions or their authentication cookie is getting invalidated. Here a a few things I can think to check:
Are the users accessing the site through a proxy server? One of our customers has a proxy that will sometimes close all open connections causing ASP.NET to see the session as new.
Could an overly agressive anti-virus, anti-spyware product be "eating" the session authentication cookie?
Do they have a cookie manager browser add-in that is causing the authentication cookie to disappear or change?
Sounds basic but I've seen this happen because of site timeouts being set too short. If the user sits on the page for longer than the timeout, they will be forced to logon again. And this could be specific to a page when that page presents a large amount of data that takes a while for them to go through.
One other thing I just thought of, have you allowed multiple worker processes for the ASP.NET process (aka web gardens)? If so, the same constraints as with a web farm would apply for authentication.
Crack open Fiddler from the problem user's PC and see what's getting passed in the headers. My bet is on a proxy server and or networking issue.
Are the users possibly coming from a dynamic ip address? I've seen problems where the users sessions get messed up because the IP address that they're accessing the site from changes for some reason.
Are the people this is happening using a browser that's somehow different (different browser, different version, different extensions)? That could be a clue.
In general, when the problem is somewhat reproducible or at least predictable, I use Http Fiddler. Install it on a client machine, turn it on, and start browsing (this works via a system proxy - so it'll work for firefox, IE and any other proxy-supporting browsers alike). Fiddler will record all http traffic between client and server, and you can then peruse such a session later on to find any oddities.
It's a long shot, but one thing I've seen happen occasionally that can lead to these sorts of unpredictable errors is scripting parallelization issues: sometimes buttons + links have onclick handlers which cause a post-back. If you have several such handlers that fire on the same event - in particular when the default event still fires additionally to your custom onclick or whatnot - you may be causing several postbacks when it appears to be just a single postback. That can cause all kinds of unpredictable weirdness as it's not entirely clear which request ends up "winning" - and some odd errors may cause a session to terminate. Since this behaviour is very browser + network latency sensitive, it seems quite unpredictable when it occurs.
Delete the cookie on the client PC's that are playing up
ASP.NET Forms Authentication can redirect users to the login page if they do not have the credentials to access a specific page. It does this so that users who may have more than one login are given the opportunity to login with another account which may have the appropriate access. Basic question I know, but are the users using the same credentials the second time they log in?
Its possible that you have don't have specifically specified asp.net to use cookie based session but are allowing either cookie or cookieless sessions.
In the later case the session id is embedded in the Url. The type of issues you are experiences might be explained by that. Basically depending on how you define your links, some of them would not get the session id, so the user would get a new session when using those links - or maybe during a redirect. That could explain why at specific parts of your site the users loose their session.
If you have the mixed mode enabled, try setting it to only cookieless and go through your site.
Update: Based on the extra info posted there is surely more info needed for it. Some extra things to check:
Are you using subdomains, if that's the case the cookie might not be configured to allow that and that doesn't fail in all environments.
If you are using in-process session, make sure there isn't a bug in the application causing it to restart the process
Maybe what's causing it to ask for login again is an authorization check, and you have an issue on some roles related code
Is it possible that the user is just opening a separate window? ;)
To rule out the possibility of the browser or a browser addon messing things up, have you checked their User Agent strings? If they are randomly distributed it might not cause the problem, but if they're all the same, this might be a hint too.