Worklight keeps HTTP request active when user is logged out - http

I have an issue with Worklight 6.1. I will describe the scenario below:
User logs in the app and a new session is created for him. Then he stays inactive for some time until the session times out. When clicking on a button, an HTTP request is performed towards an HTTP adapter. However the Worklight server (Liberty) sees that there is no active session for this user and returns the appropriate response that the user is logged out and the user is redirected to the login page. This is correct up to here.
When the user logs in again and is redirected to the landing page, the previous request seems to have been cached and is performed resulting in an error as the necessary information is not yet available. How can I prevent this request from occruring when the user re logs in?
Thank you.

it's not possible to prevent the original request from re-sending after authentication.
The logic of the authentication and the logic of the application are separated and the result of a successful login will be the invocation of the original failed invocation.
What you can do is add to the adapter procedure implementation the logic that makes sure all the information is available, and if not - send an empty response to the client and in the client do whatever you want to do when the data is missing.
This should be done for all the procedures that rely on the session state.

Related

CAS logout and intercept POST request

I'm developping a webapp linked to a CAS server with phpCAS. Up to now everything was going well, I was able to access my app after the CAS authentication. I'm now supposed to implement a logout feature : when someone logs out of the CAS server, it sends logout request to all apps opened for that session.
The problem is my app doesn't seem to receive that request. I contacted the adminstrator who told me that he can see the request leaving the server. He then asked me to confirm him that my server received that request.
And here is the problem : I have no idea how to see if the server received the logout request (a json file...apparently a POST Method is used to send the data to the address of my app...as you see, I have no idea what I'm talking about.). I've been searching for days now and I'm totally in the dark. I tried to use tcpdump. I see a TCP F Flag when I logout of the CAS server so it seemed first like a good thing. But I have no idea how to see if my server has received a logout request.
Hoping that someone can help me...
Thanking you in advance.
And here is the problem : I have no idea how to see if the server received the logout request
You need to design some kind of filter/interceptor that sits in front of your application and intercepts all requests. This filter should examine the request body to see if the request is indeed a logout request. If it is, parse and consume the request body and begin to logout and remove the application session accordingly.
...with a little bit of searching and effort, it looks like phpCAS can handle logout requests on its own:
https://github.com/apereo/phpCAS/blob/master/docs/examples/example_logout.php
apparently a POST Method is used to send the data to the address of my app
Not "apparently"; rather, exactly. According to the docs:
The CAS Server MAY support Single Logout (SLO). SLO means that the user gets logged out not only from the CAS Server, but also from all visited CAS client applications. If SLO is supported by the CAS Server, the CAS Server MUST send a HTTP POST request containing a logout XML document (see Appendix C) to all service URLs provided to CAS during this CAS session whenever a Ticket Granting Ticket is explicitly expired by the user (e.g. during logout). CAS Clients that do not support the SLO POST requests MUST ignore these requests. SLO requests MAY also be initiated by the CAS Server upon TGT idle timeout.
And then here is the actual payload.

How to intercept UI routes in Angular for user session management?

We have an angular application with node as the back end. We have an authenticate server where session management is done. There is a http interceptor that we are using in order to check whether a session is live in order to execute the http request. If the session has expired we navigate to Login page. And this works for most of the pages as we have some or the other http request in ngOnInit and hence they work fine. But I want to know how to intercept when there are no http requests on load. How do I encounter this? Should I use canActivate? Any suggestions would be helpful.
Thanks
Yes, you can use the canActivate hook of the Angular Router for doing this. You don't want to repeat the login check code in every component, canActivate can by reused in other parts of the application in the router config declaration. You can also check if the user has permissions to see this page.
What you can also do is to make the request and wait for the response, if the response is 403 the HTTP Interceptor routes back to the Login page.
If you don't want to check every time, you can use local storage to save the start session date and check if that is expired.

How to catch user closed window without logging out of application

My requirement is user should not log in from multiple browser or system simultaneously in application. For this I maintained the flag in database, so whenever user is logged in I am updating flag as yes and when he logged out I am updating it as no.
My issue is if user close the browser window without logging out from application then I am unable to update the flag. So next time when user try to logging in application, It is saying user is already logged in.
I tried using Onbeforeunload event in master page, but whenever I am changing the menu in my application. It is firing that event. For updating the flag I used page methods. But this is not working properly.
I would say, send often via a ajax call to your API that a 'ping' to confirm you are still online. If there is no ping or page change after 3 minutes, I consider the user has been logged off and it sets him as "logged off" in database.
At least, I do this using javascript, but i'm sure you can also in your client-side part of the ASP.NET app you are making.
You can't handle this only by client-side code, using e.g. beforeunload, because the page/browser may be closed for many reasons (e.g. lack of electricity).
What you can do is:
Scheduler on your backend which verifies whether an user did some action since e.g. 1min. In that case you have to update information about user action in your DB after every ajax requests (Hugo Regibo suggested ping requests).
Disadvantage od this solution is this period - when an user turns off the page then he will be not able to log in again for 1min.
Instead of a scheduler you can verify logged-in users (I assume you keep them in a DB table) after each requests.
Use web sockets, you will have continuous connection and you will be notified about closed connection immediately. Disadvantage of this is web sockets don't scale so good as stateless HTTP.
Besides that I don't know whether you use iis with a session provider or not? And when an user closes the page and opens it again should be able to log in with his saved credentials. You should write more of how your project looks like.
I would do it by saving a Session object for each login call. A session ID would then be stored in the user's cookie or authentication token. Each call to the system would validate the user via their session ID. If that session has been invalidated, they just get sent to the login prompt. Whenever the user logs in, it invalidates all of their other sessions.
This way the user could be in their browser on their machine, navigate away, close the browser, and come back to find their session still alive without having to log back in. But, if they log into another machine, then their old session would be invalidated.

Windows Authentication Timeout

How can you suspend access to a user session after a specified interval of inactivity when using Windows Integrated Security for an ASP.NET MVC Website?
When using Kerberos for authentication Internet Explorer (IE) will continue sending the same credentials for each subsequent request to the server until one of two things happens:
   a) The user closes their browser.
   b) The server refuses the credentials with a 401 status code.
This behavior is KB 264921.
If we want to simulate a session than we have to implement the following steps:
Create a sliding expiration cookie for the duration of the session.
Check for that cookie for every request: begin_request or global filters. If the cookie is missing return a 401 status code for that specific request.
Next request will trigger the authentication prompt.
I was hoping someone else having a better ideea, this one feels kind of hacky.

How to clear SSL state in browser when user's session expires?

I'm working on an ASP.NET application where our users authenticate using client certificates over HTTPS. Our users are only using IE7.
Once a client certificate has been used to authenticate successfully it stays in the browser's SSL cache until the process is closed or the user manually clears the SSL cache. We want to be able to clear the SSL cache whenever a user logs out, or their session expires, to improve the security of the system.
Our clients already use smartcards to access the system, which unload certificates automatically when the card is removed from the client computer, but this does not clear the browser cache at all, leaving a potential avenue of attack from another user who had access to the same machine as the genuine user.
I've found out how to do the actual cache clearing from JavaScript:
document.execCommand("ClearAuthenticationCache");
which works perfectly when a user explicitly logs out, as we can execute the script on the client before allowing the user to log in again.
NOTE: IE7 only lets the cache be cleared programmatically when HTTP Keep-Alives are disabled on the web server.
Here's the tricky bit - if a client's session expires, I don't know of any way to handle this in the browser before the user tries to login again. I can't clear the state when they get to the login page, because I need the state cleared and a new certificate chosen before the page executes on the server.
Any ideas? Apologies for length of question, but background is important for this one.
Never mind, I came up with a good solution:
When the user successfully logs in, we create an additional session cookie that doesn't expire until the browser is closed.
If the user comes back to the login page later and the request is unauthenticated, we check for the existence of the session cookie - if it exists, we know that the user has previously had a session, so we explicitly log them out, exactly as we do for the user-initiated logout. If the session cookie doesn't exist then we attempt to automatically log the user in using their certificate.
The custom session cookie is deleted for each explicit log out, and re-populated for each successful login.
This gives us the best experience for the user, and guarantees that a certificate will be cached only as long as a session is still valid (15 minutes, sliding). Also, the session cookie cannot be removed by the user so there is no way to bypass this behaviour. They can't use the site without accepting session cookies either.

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