Hi we've been getting an issue in which WCM references are being generated
towards protected content for anonymous/unauthenticated users. In WCM this
basically means that the links have a "/myconnect" (protected) context instead
of a "/connect" (unprotected) context in their URL.
Now WAS has a functionality in which if a user generates a request towards a
protected resource while being unauthenticated WAS places the URL to that
resource in a cookie called WASReqURL, and when the user authenticates it
redirects the user to that URL. In my case our users are getting redirected
to an image resource or a file resource, etc. This changes depending what is
the last requested protected item and what's in the cache, etc.
Now I've checked permissions on the libraries, sites, content items, components,
etc, but that still doesn't help. And the worst thing is that this issue is
intermittent almost as if it was tied to some sort of performance issue.
Thank you
Lotus WCM really does that when it thinks the anonymous user does not have enough access rights. If you are absolutely sure that your access rights are properly defined, congratulations. You have found something worth opening PMR. Attach the PUMA mustgather to it.
Related
I have a website that authenticates users with the active directory. This website is made for internal company use and does not hold any sensitive information. The website is secured with SSL. When a user logs in, his/her username and password will be transmitted to the server through POST. I then store his/her username in a session cookie with a TTL of 1 day, refreshed by every single web action. From this point on, every webpage will check to see if this cookie with the username exists. If it does, it will allow users to access that certain page. Login out will just remove this cookie.
Would this way of authentication be acceptable? Is there a better way to handle user authentication? Is it necessary to use sessions instead and store session id's in cookies?
It does work out nicely to use Sessions, yes. I don't know what language you'd be using, but storing information in general locally is a good idea (this does not include sensitive and private information, ie. passwords).
Pages usually check your authentication (and its type) upon loading.
I've lost my touch with PHP, but for instance ASP.NET has a pretty neat (but complicated) Identity system where your login information would be stored in a separate Session, and destroyed upon logging off, but also stores information regarding its Type. This would later allow the developer to mark pages that would require a specific type of an Identity. For example:
[Authorize(Roles="admin")]
public ActionResult Index() {
// Your action information
}
Again, I'm rusty with PHP, but I imagine it's similar where you'd simply check the Sessions before the <html> tag, ie.
<?php
if(is_null($_SESSION["user-info"]["type"])
header("Location: index.php");
?>
<html>
...
Overall, the way you use sessions in each of the back-end web development languages could defer, but the overall usability is the same. You'd use Sessions to store User information, Store "basket" items, etc.
I want to know how can I force a user to log in the the application again if the page is being opened in new tab or new browser.
Edit:-
My apologies I misunderstood the requirement.
I am authenticating the user in my log-in page but not anywhere else. So what is happening because of that, even if i log out of application and type url say bla.com/apple I can access my application.
I figured to prevent this from happening, I have to write a base controller that checks for the right user. Am I moving in the right direction.
Thanks
Addressing the edit -
Authentication can be handled per controller or on individual actions. Simple place the [Authorize] attribute appropriately. This assumes however that somewhere an authentication token is being set. [Authorize] checks against the HttpContext's current User (an IPrincipal).
You mentioned above that you're just validating against a local username and password, in one place, so I'm guessing that no token (session, cookie) are being set?
You have a few options here to get that token stored and persisted across requests:
ASP.Net integrated membership provider (Intro)
A custom MembershipProvider (Example)
Full-on custom flow. (Example)
Each has ups and downs and depends on how exactly you want to handle on-boarding your users. It's hard to answer more specifically because it can be a very large topic (and a very broad question).
Here's the official pages for MVC security.
I'm assisting another developer with adding a link to a page in a product called Lawson that we use in-house. I need to pass the authenticated user's employee ID to an HTML page we're bolting on. I'm still looking at existing pages on the server, but thought I'd ask: does anyone know how the Javascript object that represents the authenticated user works? It looks like something server-side must be dynamically creating a Javascript object that has useful properties. It is usually called 'AuthUser'. I want to add the necessary JS references to my new page to support this object and access its properties. Does anyone have any experience with that? Thanks!
If you are in a portal session, you can access this in javascript through attributes of portalWnd.oUserProfile:
alert(portalWnd.oUserProfile.getAttribute("id"))
This will give you the logged in user's short username. Many other attributes are available. To see a complete list, log into a portal session and then replace the URL with:
http://YOURPORTALSERVER/servlet/Profile
I'm not sure what you mean by "bolting on", but if you want to pass an attribute to an external page launched from a Portal session, you could create a user shortcut via Portal preferences using something like:
javascript:window.open("http://yourserver/yourpage.html?user=" + portalWnd.oUserProfile.getAttribute("id"))
as the target and process in yourpage.html like a normal GET method form.
If you are still puzzling over this all these months later, provide some specifics if you need more guidance.
I am wanting to build an admin tool where I can "impersonate" users of my site, without having to lose my session as an admin.
I would like to be able to open an iframe that will view the website "as the user", without changing the state of the page that opened the iframe.
Is that possible? Is there a better way to do this?
It's possible, but there's a bit "but" :)
Just a couple options to start with:
Use URL-based session tokens (as Java Servlets do when you have cookies disabled)
Use different domains for "normal" site and admin interface
iframe itself won't help you much: it will always share its cookies with the browser. So in order to avoid that, you can use either of the above options—but that does not depend on the iframe.
What language? My answer is based on the assumption that PHP is your chosen language.
Firstly, I would say you have planned your application wrong if session impersonation is the only way you can view your site as another user while still keeping your admin login intact.
One way you could do it, and again this is assuming that you are using PHP as well as the default session management functions within and you do not have a custom session handler would be to load the iframe url with the ?PHPSESSID=sessionidhere parameter.
A better way to do this is to create your site and authenticate users via a user object of sorts and then add some sort of url parameter such as ?userbrowseid=123
Then when you load the page, your code will only check if the parameter exists if you are already logged in as an admin. The page would then overwrite your current user object with the user object of the user with the id 123. Steps should be taken to make sure your session cookies are not overwridden with the impersonated user object. As this would be in an iframe, your site will work as an admin and the iframe will be loaded as the user object.
Here's the issue at hand: I have developed an ASP.NET MVC3 application using Razor. I have also implemented a custom membership provider and overridden the ValidateUser() method. Within, I query my db and get a lot of user information in addition to the password auth.
At the moment, I am pushing this information, i.e. companyId, to static properties of a class. This works and I can display/use this information throughout my app. The problem arises when a user closes their browser tab. Upon re-opening the app, the user is authenticated via a cookie, so they don't need to re-login; however, those static variables are blown away.
So guys and girls, how would/do you conquer this issue? Should I append the extra info to the session cookie? Or perhaps a better solution?
Use the ProfileProvider in ASP.NET.
For application level variables, they are going to be subject to application pool recycles and similar "simulated" restarts related to users starting all over. These variables should be completely independent of user usage and should be able to be recreated easily. If you have variables that are user dependent or that can't be restored easily without some sort of outside intervention then you will definitely need a different method of storage.
If the data is user specific, storing it in the session cookie is probably the best idea. If the data is user-related but branches multiple users it should be stored in a database or a flat file somewhere. If the data has nothing to do with users specifically then it should just be in a database or configuration file.