Symfony2 renew Session and store value - session

My Users can change their passwords on a form. If this the form is valid I encode it, invalidate the session by using
$this->get('security.context')->setToken(null);
$this->getSession()->invalidate();
...flush the user to the database and do a redirect (to the same url).
Beside this I have a mechanism to store some information in the session before forwarding and showing this data in the 'forwarded' template.
Both work well on their own, but not together :-)
I can see, that the value is written (after invalidating the session) and I believe, that symfony instantiates a new session.
I just don't know, what happens after that. Maybe symfony is doing 'some magic', because it 'injects' the login-page before show the redirected url.

I don't really understand what you're trying to do, and why you're invalidating the session, but your User need to be logged in to see the redirected URL.
Your code logs him out.
You can log a user by doing so :
use Symfony\Component\Security\Core\Authentication\Token\UsernamePasswordToken;
$authToken = new UsernamePasswordToken($user, null, 'secured_area', array('ROLE_USER'));
$this->get('security.context')->setToken($authToken);
The third parameter is the providerKey, and the fourth is a roles array.

Related

Cross/Multiple tab communication during login

In implementation of Login, I want to make sure if a user is already logged in one tab of the browser and opens the same web site in another tab, he gets redirected to homepage rather than the log in page. It's an ideal scenario as it happens in all the web site. I am achieving the same by storing logged in unique user token in local storage. Is it the best way to achieve it? Kindly guide! is it safe? If not how to go about it?
Just consider everything on the client as tainted or possibly manipulated.
So basically you should always check on the server side if the client has a valid session and only then deliver the homepage to it.
I would use a cookie set by the server side - just a random id bound to the actual client session on the server.
So the client could mess with that, but would have a hard time to guess another (also random) session id.
The cookie should be cleared by the server if the user logs out.
Then I would check on every call if he has a valid session id and if not directly send him to the login page by a redirect. Additionally you could then send him from the login page to the homepage whenever he is already logged in.

How to persist session data in an AngularJS application?

I have this web app written in AngularJs that uses cookies to authenticate the requests in a REST API.
Once the user logs in, the cookie is received and saved in the browser and all subsequent requests send the cookie along to the server. There is a 'User' service/object that saves the isLoggedIn and username values (for UI display/flow). Now, if I refresh the 'index' page, the app restarts. This means that my 'User' object will be cleared. I can check the existence of the cookie and, if it exists, I can re-set the User.isLoggeIn as true and go from there, but I still need to get the username, id, etc. So, my question is: should I create some sort of 'ping' endpoint in the API to verify if a cookie is valid? And if so, the API would send me back the user id and username... OR should I persist the user data in LocalStorage (or some similar cross-browser thing) and just assume the user is logged if the cookie exists? Any other subsequent requests to pages that need authentication would be automatically verified. So, this question really only applies to the scenario where the user refreshes the index page - hence, restarting the web app. I want to know the user data because I want to show a 'user homepage' instead of the 'public homepage'.
What do you think?
You should depend on the server for this. Creating something like GetCurrentUser method on the server. If the user is logged on this returns all the properties of the user.
You should even use this server api to get the user data after authentication completes. So the authentication become two step process first the user is authenticated, on success another call is made to server to get current users details.
Using client side local storage for this would not be ideal because you need to do lot of book keeping, in terms of cleaning the logged in user on log out or session expiration.
Also cookies from server would have expiration times an all, and making decision just based on cookie existing on local storage may not be optimal approach.

where should i set the session api and client

Here is the situation, I have setup 2 codeigniter installation.
One will be a client and one will be an api. Further improvement of this will be
The client will no longer be made from CI, since I wasn't using it's functionality. I just wanted to start out from a mvc framework right on.
My question would be where should I be storing sessions? during logins.
Below is how I did it, but I think I did it wrong.
I created a Login from the client. This one sends the login credentials to the api and then validated these information sent by the client and will return a message/response whethere the login credentials were valid or not.
If the login details were valid, the api will set a session in it's controller like this
if(true) {
$this->session->set_userdata($array);
}
This is in the login_controller I created. Is this the proper way of setting sessions for a client of a api?
You've got the concept right. You only want to set session userdata upon verifying the user supplied valid credentials.
That said, make sure you're using encrypted cookies and, if you're handling sensitive data, store your session data in the database. Storing it in the database causes some odd quirks with how sessions work in CodeIgniter (mainly with flashdata), but the added benefit of positive identification might potentially be worth it.
By storing the session data in the database, you can more positively verify a user is who they claim to be (in terms of the session ID, etc). The reason is because the session data is stored only in the database, and not in the session cookie (which only holds session ID and some other info). That way, even if someone does manage to decrypt the cookie, they can't modify their userdata to pretend to be someone else, like you might be able to with the cookies only method.

Getting a secure session object from a non secure page in ASP

I'm maintaining a system built in ASP.
The login process is in SSL. Meaning, when the user clicks on "Login", his user name and password are sent securely to the server.
The login process produces a Session object, which is the ID of the now logged-in user.
After finishing the login process, the page redirects the browser to a non secure page. This page tries to access the ID Session object.
Until last week, this worked fine. Our system was running on IIS6.0, and the non-secure page could access this Secure ID Session object.
However, after switching over to IIS7.5, this inevitable security hole was closed(or so I assume). The non-secure page cannot access the Secure ID Session object anymore.
Access to the object is done simply like this:
string ID = Session(SESSION_USER_ID)
just to check things out, I tried access a non-secure Session object from the Secure login pages - this failed as well.
Is there any way to access a Secure Session object from a non-secure page?
BTW, I've probably mistaken with some of the terms here, but I think the scenario is more or less clear. Please tell me if this is not the case.
I've come across this problem before, I ended up getting around it by, when changing into or out of SSL, calling a function that would write the session variables to cookies, and then read back from the cookies into the SSL session variables.

Codeigniter session security

How can I increase the security of my sessions?
$this->session->userdata('userid')
I've been throwing this little bad boy around for my ajax calls. Some cases I haven't. Then I was like, is this really secure using id from the DOM? what if the DOM is changed to hack user accounts data? So then I was like I guess anytime a user is doing something relating to their id, only sessions should be referenced. Am I right?
Referenced like so:
$this->some_model->do_data_stuff($dataId, $this->session->userdata('userid'));
Then I read this:
While the session data array stored in the user's cookie contains a
Session ID, unless you store session data in a database there is no
way to validate it. For some applications that require little or no
security, session ID validation may not be needed, but if your
application requires security, validation is mandatory. Otherwise, an
old session could be restored by a user modifying their cookies.
http://codeigniter.com/user_guide/libraries/sessions.html
I'm not going to be storing financial data but I don't want any data on my site corrupted ever. Does SO use session validation? How much overhead will this validation cost? How would a session be hacked? What are some things to look out for with session security?
Using CodeIgniter sessions with database is going to be fairly secure. You just don't have to trust the input that the user gives. Even if you are using AJAX, the CodeIgniter session will work just like any standard call, so the same security goes on.
What happens with the CodeIgniter session is that the server stores the cookie, and every time the user does an action that would change the content of the cookie, it is first compared to the previous cookie.
If the user changes the content of the session cookie in the browser, CodeIgniter will notice on the next server call, and create a new session for the user, basically logging him out.
CodeIgniter doesn't really need the data stored in the cookie in the user's browser, and as long as you're using
$this->session->userdata('userid');
you're going to get trusted server-side data. The user can't change that. Furthermore, the cookie can be encrypted, and you should have it encrypted. Just look in config.php of CodeIgniter.
There are several other protections around the session data: the short refresh timeout (usually 300 seconds), it checks if the IP changed, and if the browser changed. In other words, in the worst case scenario, the only way to spoof the session data is by having the same version of the browser, having the same IP, getting direct access to the computer to copy/paste the cookie, and getting this done within 5 minutes.
So, watch out for the guy sitting beside you!

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