Can we please get back to discussing what the best user experience is
first. Then we can discuss implementations?
On 16 March 2017 at 18:37, Bill Burke <bburke(a)redhat.com> wrote:
On 3/16/17 10:50 AM, Marek Posolda wrote:
On 16/03/17 15:27, Bill Burke wrote:
* Hidden field in a form is not a good approach. Its very brittle and
will not work in every situation. So huge -1 there.
* browser back button is not required to resubmit the HTTP request as the
page can be rendered from cache. Therefore you couldn't have a "Page
Expired" page displayed when the back button is pressed without setting the
header "Cache-Control: no-store, must-revalidate, max-age=0"
Maybe we can do some javascript stuff like this:
http://stackoverflow.com/
questions/9046184/reload-the-site-when-reached-via-browsers-back-button
But that would mean that we will need to inject some common javascript
stuff into every HTML form displayed by authentication SPI. Could we rely
on that?
I don't think this is a good approach as Authenticator develoeprs would
have to do the same thing.
* Furthermore, without some type of code/information within the URL, you
also wouldn't know if somebody clicked the back button or not or whether
this was a page refresh or some other GET request.
Once we have the cookie with loginSessionID, we can lookup the
loginSession. And loginSession will contain last code (same like
clientSession now) and last authenticator. Then we just need to compare the
code from the loginSession with the code from request. If it matches, we
are good. If it doesn't match, it's likely the refresh of some previous
page and in that case, we can just redirect to last authenticator.
This is the current behavior, but instead of using a cookie, the "code" is
stored in the URL.
With only a cookie though and no URL information, you won't know the
different between a Back Button and a Page Refresh for GET requests. For
POST requests, you won't be able to tell the differencee between a Back
Button, Page Refresh, or whether the POST is targeted to an actual
Authenticator.
The more I think about it, things should probably stay the way it
currently is, with improvements on user experience. I think we can support
what Stian suggested with the current implementation.
Not sure if we also need to track all codes, so we are able to distinct
between the "expired" code, and between the "false" code, which was
never
valid and was possibly used by some attacker for CSRF. Maybe we can sign
codes with HMAC, so we can verify if it is "expired" or "false" code
without need to track the list of last codes.
This has been done in the past. Then it was switched to using the same
code throughout the whole flow, then Stian switched it to changing the code
throughout the flow. I don't know if he uses a hash or not.
Bill