I have implemented custom membership provider in my project. i kept one flag on database to get the users online. i want to reset this flag on the log out, i can do this if the user log out properly . I have to reset the flag on database even if the the browser closed directly or on any machine failure or normal time out, any tricks on membership provider to solve this. experts am waiting for your answers!!!!!!!
Thanks.
just put a field for users like IS_LOGOUT_BUTTON_PRESSED typeof(bool) default false
if the user click LogOut set it TRUE.
if the user closes browser, it will stay false. Then you can see what user did.
I am afraid that you are tilting against windmills.
You will notice that the sql providers implement the 'users online' by simply updating last activity in most all provider methods (and subsequently the stored procedures) and then using a predefined 'online time window' to determine if the user may still be online.
To implement an authoritative 'is_online' flag would require that you have complete control over the user's means of starting a session and ending a session, which you do not and can not do due to both the nature of the browser ui and the way that sessions and ticket expirations are bumped.
So you can never really be sure whether a user is online or not, rendering any efforts you have made to track this metric unreliable.
And unreliable data is often of less value than no data at all.
I am quite certain that you will find nothing but frustration in attempting to apply an absolute, as described in your question, to the stateless and freeform nature of sessions and tickets.
Sorry I have not better news.
Related
I have a laravel webapp and I check if the user can perform certain actions or access certain information at every step of the way not just during the login. For example when they wish to view their assets I check for their UAC, after they click on them I check again, even if the edit, delete buttons are not visible, there is still a check in place in the code. And this pattern continues throughout the whole webapp. Is this overkill, will it make my webapp too cluttered with checks all over the place?
Yes, it is. Every time you don't check for access before performing a privileged action, you take the risk that an intruder might find a way to bypass your earlier checks and somehow trigger that action without actually having proper access to it. A few extra checks are a small price to pay for robustness and peace of mind.
In particular, you should always re-check privileges on the server for each new request made by the client, since you should never trust user input, and since everything the client sends to the server is potentially under the user's control. For example, even if you disable the "edit" or "delete" buttons in the client interface, what's to stop a malicious (or even just inquisitive) user from re-enabling them e.g. through their browser's developer tools, or even from simply spoofing the actual edit/delete request that the button would trigger?
If you're lucky, all a missing server-side privileges check will do is let some user see a bunch of deleted garbage. If you're not so lucky, it might give them full admin access on your site.
It is indeed a good practice and middleware can help you achieve this goal more easily.
Check the Laravel documentation for more information
This is a follow-up question to Is Forms Authentication as described in the Nancy docs susceptible to session hijacking?
I understand now how Nancy Form Authentication works and also the idea behind it, thanks to Steven Robbins' answer.
However, for my application that approach is not sufficient. It must not be possible to gain eternal access for an attacker if he manages to steal the auth cookie once. Thus, I'm currently investigating possibilities to switch to a session-based approach to authentication, so I can invalidate sessions when the user logs out and also after a fixed amount of time.
Nice thing about Nancy, such things can be customized!
My question is, does it make sense to reuse Nancy.FormsAuthentication for that purpose? One solution I have in mind is making the user identifier only temporarily valid. That way I would delete the GUID identifier from the user database when the user logs out, and create a new one everytime a user logs in.
I'm asking because the docs state:
It is also important to know that the identifier should be treated as
permanent for the user that it was generated for and will be reused
across requests and application sessions.
Are there any unwanted side-effects when I ignore that and make the identifier non-permanent?
Yes and no.
If you change it each time the user logs in then you are effectively logging the user out.
You could create a Session / Identity table which allows the same user to login multiple times (assuming that the browser is different) which would allow you to manage the timeout / extending the timeout on each authentication.
That would require no changes to the Forms Auth, you would simply change the IUserMapper to authenticate against your Session / Identity table rather than the user directly.
(hope all that makes sense)
Let's say a user is banned in a website, but his session is still active. What's the best way of preventing him from performing an action that a banned user is not allowed to do?
The two plausible solutions I came up with are
making an additional checking previous to every "major" action,
like making a post in the forum, sending a private message, etc. to make sure
he is not banned (checking with the database)
destroying his session
Now, the latter solution could be done by setting an expiration for the cookie, but this would be bothersome for the rest of the users as they would have to log in again.
Other option would be setting a timeout in the session in which the scripts checks if he's banned with the database and then destroying his session if he is, but this seems like a bit too much.
What's the best way to deal with this?
If I understand what you mean by setting an expiration for the setting cookie, I would recommend against it. You want the control to be on the server side - don't trust your clients; they can easily prevent a cookie on their side from being destroyed.
Hopefully, whatever framework you're using has a way to delete the server-side data associated with a user's session, instead, invalidating the client's session id.
If your application is object oriented, you could do a check in your constructor, if the user is banned, and if he is, unset his session/call the log out function.
I'm writing an asp.net Web Application. I wrote a login page that authenticates a user and stores their UserID in the Session["UserID"]. Every page in the web application will check for a valid Session["UserID"]. If not valid, then redirect the user to the login screen.
This works great, but it's slowing down my ability to debug every page on my website. Each time I make a change to a *.cs file, I need to press F6 to rebuild my solution. Doing this destroys my session, which means I need to go back to the login screen, type my username and password, click to the page I was working on, do my tests, make code changes to my code, and repeat.
Is there a way to keep my session alive everytime I re-build my solution so I don't have to go to the login page every single time?
Unfortunately, I don't know that you will find any way around this limitation. Every time you build your project, you are going to trigger a restart of the web application. Even if you were to use a persistent store for keeping sessions, you're going to lose the session cookie being set in your browser.
You could add a "remember me" feature to your app. You'd need to do a little reimplementation, in order to keep the information about the current user authentication in a data store that is less volatile than ASP.NET session state. Also, you'd store the index to that information in a cookie that is more persistent than a session cookie.
That's the best I can think of, or at least it's the best I can think of without some significant extensions to the .NET security providers. However, take it with a grain of salt -- I've never tried to solve this particular problem before, and I hardly consider myself an expert in all things ASP.NET session-related.
The reason why you lose your session is because your application is restarted when you write to the application folder. In fact the same thing happens when you publish your application, every user currently logged in will lose their session.
This is intentional because they have no way of knowing that the DLL's you were using in your page are still there or not. So instead they monitor the folders themselves and trigger a restart when you write to them.
There is no workaround for this. It's in fact a feature that saves you time (most of the time), imagine tracking down memory corruption errors because the pointers moved around in your code!
I'm trying to figure out exactly when the event Profile_MigrateAnonymous fires.
My best guess from just tracing through my code is that it fires when it detects BOTH an anonymous membership cookie AND an authenticated membership cookie. Can anyone confirm this? I'm looking for real in depth answer here. Not just it gets called 'when a user logs in'.
Now - why do I care?
I was trying to keep the anonymous profile hanging around after a user had authenticated so that once they log out I'd still be able to tell who they were, and certain settings that may have been set.
The problem I'm seeing is that Profile_MigrateAnonymous is getting fired on EVERY request. Not just when a user has logged in. This makes me believe it to be a bad practice to keep the anonymous cookie hanging around - and that I should always call ClearAnonymousIdentifier();
For instance I have a new store and an old store. I want users that have access to the 'new store' to never be put back on the old store. Obviously - as with most shopping carts you don't need to autenticate to begin a session. Therefore I think the only way is to call 'ClearAnonymousIdentifier' as designed but keep a secondary cookie 'UseNewStore' to track which store they should go to.
is this a good interpretation. Or should I just not care that Profile_MigrateAnonymous is being called all the time?
Don't bother with it. There is a simpler way
Migrating Profile Properties During Log On
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/taab950e.aspx