I have developed a web application in Java Spring Boot. After login to the web application JSESSIONID is stored in browser cookies, now when I copy this cookie details from my current browser and create same cookie in some other browser then I'm able to login to the system without asking me for login.
Please let me know how can we prevent this Session hijacking threat. Is there anything I need to do at application level or anything on server level.
Related
In a spring security application i am navigating to the login page and entering my credentials and getting logged in.Now again if i open a new tab in the same browser and navigate to the login url it shows me the login page.If I enter another users credentials and login my previous Jsession ID(ie: the one created in the previous tab) is getting overridden with the new jsession id.Upon refreshing the previous tab the session is overridden.
I want to implement that if a user is logged in already in the application, upon navigating to the url again in another tab on the same browser the homepage of the application should open.
Please advise as how I can accomplish that?
Since the server uses the cookie to map to the current session, you'd have to control how the browser sends cookies. Every time a request is sent to a website from a new tab, most browsers will send all the cookies it has for that domain. Since your server received the same session cookie, it will treat this request as being in the same session. There's no way it can tell the difference.
Therefore, as far as cookie-based web sessions go at least, you probably won't be able to force the creation of a new session upon opening a new tab.
Background: I have a javaee webapp deployed on tomcat which uses form based authentication. When the web server receives a login request, it sends the request to a dedicated authentication service which validates user login (User id and password). After successful authentication user's session is maintained in the web server.
Problem: I have written a simple webpp source code here, to simulate the scenario. On successful login the current HttpSession instance is invalidated and new instance is created. For each request for a post login page, the session is validated. A new JSESSIONID cookie is set which is used to identify the user during the session until session is expired or user logs out. This cookie can easily viewed in browser's dev tools. If I copy the cookie and set this in a different browser via JavaScript (document.cookie="JSESSIONID=xyzz") and then try to access a post login page, the server identifies it as a valid request and session is validated successfully. The post login page is served without user being challenged for user Id and password.
POC: User opens chrome and enter the URL http://localhost:8080/mywebapp/ and logs in with admin and pass1234. On successful log in the home page http://localhost:8080/mywebapp/home is shown. Now the JSESSIONID cookie is copied and set in FireFox. User enters http://localhost:8080/mywebapp/home in Firefox and is shown the home page without being challenged for userId and password.
Question: How can this be prevented wherein same session is getting replicated over multiple browsers?
You can't prevent this specific case of simply copying the cookie from your own browser (or by copying the cookie value from a HTTP payload copypaste/screenshot posted by an ignorant somewhere on the Internet). You can at most prevent the cookie getting hijacked by XSS or man-in-middle attacks.
This all is elaborated in Wikipedia page on the subject Session Hijacking of which I snipped away irrelevant parts (either already enforced by Servlet API, or are simply not applicable here).
Prevention
Methods to prevent session hijacking include:
Encryption of the data traffic passed between the parties by using SSL/TLS; in particular the session key (though ideally all traffic for the entire session[11]). This technique is widely relied-upon by web-based banks and other e-commerce services, because it completely prevents sniffing-style attacks. However, it could still be possible to perform some other kind of session hijack. In response, scientists from the Radboud University Nijmegen proposed in 2013 a way to prevent session hijacking by correlating the application session with the SSL/TLS credentials[12]
(snip, not relevant)
(snip, not relevant)
Some services make secondary checks against the identity of the user. For example, a web server could check with each request made that the IP address of the user matched the one last used during that session. This does not prevent attacks by somebody who shares the same IP address, however, and could be frustrating for users whose IP address is liable to change during a browsing session.
Alternatively, some services will change the value of the cookie with each and every request. This dramatically reduces the window in which an attacker can operate and makes it easy to identify whether an attack has taken place, but can cause other technical problems (for example, two legitimate, closely timed requests from the same client can lead to a token check error on the server).
(snip, not relevant)
In other words:
Use HTTPS instead of HTTP to prevent man-in-middle attacks.
Add a checkbox "Lock my IP" to login form and reject requests from different IP associated with same session in a servlet filter. This only works on users who know themselves they have a fixed IP.
Change session cookie on every request. Interesting at first sight, but breaks when user has same website open in multiple browser tabs/windows in same "session".
Not mentioned, but make sure you don't have a XSS hole anywhere, else it's very easy stealing cookies.
Last but not least, I'd like to make clear that this problem is absolutely not specifically related to Servlet API and the JSESSIONID cookie. All other stateful server side languages/frameworks such as PHP (PHPSESSID) and ASP (ASPSESSIONID) also expose exactly the same security problem. The JSESSIONID was previously (decade ago orso) only a bit more in news because by default it was possible to pass the session identifier along in the URL (which was done to support HTTP session in clients who have cookies disabled). Trouble started when ignorant endusers copypasted the full URL with JSESSIONID inside to share links with others. Since Servlet 3.0 you can turn off JSESSIONID in URLs by enforcing a cookie-only policy.
<session-config>
<tracking-mode>COOKIE</tracking-mode>
</session-config>
See also:
How do servlets work? Instantiation, sessions, shared variables and multithreading
How to prevent adding jsessionid at the end of redirected url
remove jsessionid in url rewrite in spring mvc
What you have stated is called session hijacking. There are many good answers on how to prevent it.
Using same Jsession ID to login into other machine
we can use Encryption or hide JSESSIONID using Browser control.
Thanks
Currently I know that my setup is working because I was able to login properly using the basic HTTP authentication.
I used these properties:
security.basic.enabled=true
security.user.name=user
security.user.password=1qaz2wsx
security.user.role=USER
However, I want to relogin again. I tried clearing cookies (I assumed it was saved there), I checked my local/session storage and cookies in Chrome dev tools but it was blank.
I tried accessing my site in incognito and it asks me to login (for the first time since I only logged in to Chrome non-incognito).
How do I "kill" my session in Spring Security?
If you use basic authentication, the browser stores the authentication until you close it (or exit the incognito mode, if you used it). There is no possibility to delete the session on server side, since the browser would just reauthenticate. If you want to be able to logout, use form login.
Is it possible to synchronise liferay session with siteminder session ?
Scenario :
There are 2 applications say A & B which uses siteminder authentication.Both of the application shares same siteminder session. Application A is running liferay portlet and the application B is a servlet application.
User logs in to the Application A and navigate to Application B using SSO.
User works in Application B for some amount of time which keeps siteminder session from getting expired.But liferay session in application A is getting expired due to inactivity.
Is there any way to keep the session in liferay synch with the siteminder session? Any suggestions would be really helpful?
Set the below properties in portal-ext.properties file
Set the auto-extend mode to true to avoid having to ask the user whether to extend the session or not. Instead, it will be automatically extended. The purpose of this mode is to keep the session open as long as the user's browser is open with a portal page loaded.
session.timeout=30
session.timeout.auto.extend=true
This would not expire liferay session and if siteminder session expires and you access a resources which is protected by siteminder, you will be asked to login again.
I have a web application running on JBoss server based on JSF framework.
I need to redirect my request to an entirely new web application running on some other server and on some other machine geographically located.
My doubt is if I redirect the request from my web page to another web application web page will it expose the session parameter at the other end.
I have some very critical information stored in the session and I cannot afford to expose the details to another web application..
Along with the redirect request I would be sending some parameters to the remote web application which will use these parameters for certain mathematical computation.
Can anyone guide me on this?
Is it possible for the other web application to see what is present in the session
No. That would have been a huge security hole throughout the current world wide web. Think about it once again, are you able to see what for example google.com and stackoverflow.com have in its session? No? Then the other web application definitely also can't. All which the web application can see from outside is the sole incoming HTTP request in its entirety.
This problem/question has at least nothing to do with JSF.
If you invalidate the session before the redirect then it doesn't matter if the external web application sees your session cookie. They couldn't turn around and emulate requests on your session anyway because the session is no longer valid.
request.getSession().invalidate();
I don't think this will be an issue though because I doubt that the request header to another web application would include the same session cookie.