[keycloak-dev] offline access

[Stian Thorgersen]

Cloning into offline persistence is a good way to do it, I'm worried about the complexity of it though. We'd need two separate user session stores and do we look in both when there's a request for a user session? If we don't look in both how do we make sure the persisted sessions are re-loaded into the non-peristed store at startup time? That's even worse in a cluster. I've implemented a hybrid store (where some stuff was kept in jpa and others in-mem) it did end up as a bit of a cluster fuck though.

I don't have an issue with admins managing offline sessions in the existing way they manage sessions, actually that's probably the best way. We would probably need to add support for logging out all or just non-offline when logging out a user or application though.

I don't like the idea of just having an offline column in account management though as I think that's confusing to users. We need to at some point give the account management some TLC as it looks pretty horrible and there's some concepts that's probably confusing to most users. For example sessions, logs and even worse federated identities. As a user I'd expect a list of devices that I have logged in (Home computer, Work computer, Mobile, etc.) and the ability to log that out. Then I'd expect a separate list of applications/clients that can access my account where I can revoke access to a specific client (which would also invalidate any offline access). That's still perfectly achievable with either two approaches though.

Finally, we also need to introduce an offline role/scope that we can assign to applications either through admin console, but it should also be possible to use ?scope=offline which is what the OIDC spec mandates. This would then work together with persisting consent/grants and the account management would show what permissions each client has, including offline access. There should be a single revoke access button for each client. That would remove all persisted consents/grant for that client and also remove all client sessions for that client. Doing that would also expire all "offline" refresh tokens without requiring the user to manually manage "client sessions".

Another thing we should probably also add support to view/manage persisted consents in the admin console. For example an admin should be able to see what consents a user has given to what application and also revoke.

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Bill Burke" <bburke at redhat.com>
> To: "Stian Thorgersen" <stian at redhat.com>, "Marek Posolda" <mposolda at redhat.com>
> Cc: keycloak-dev at lists.jboss.org
> Sent: Thursday, 9 April, 2015 3:02:42 PM
> Subject: Re: [keycloak-dev] offline access
> 
> 
> 
> On 4/9/2015 8:01 AM, Stian Thorgersen wrote:
> >
> >
> > ----- Original Message -----
> >> From: "Marek Posolda" <mposolda at redhat.com>
> >> To: "Stian Thorgersen" <stian at redhat.com>, "Bill Burke"
> >> <bburke at redhat.com>
> >> Cc: keycloak-dev at lists.jboss.org
> >> Sent: Friday, 3 April, 2015 4:02:04 PM
> >> Subject: Re: [keycloak-dev] offline access
> >>
> >> Maybe we should use name "offline tokens" to not confuse them with
> >> classic "refresh tokens" ? Refresh tokens are used to refresh access
> >> token and they are always tight to user session, when "offline tokens"
> >> are not tight to user session.
> >
> > I don't think there's anything in OpenID Connect that ties a refresh token
> > to a user session, that's just what we've done.
> >
> > See http://openid.net/specs/openid-connect-core-1_0.html#OfflineAccess
> >
> 
> That's not the way I read it.  There wouldn't be a section within OIDC
> about offline access if the refresh token wasn't assumed to be a part of
> a session.  IMO, "offline" is really just a persisted user/client
> session.  
> It is governed by the same exact rules as regular user
> sessions.  A client just needs permission to do it.   You would need to
> store the same exact metadata for "offline" sessions as you would for
> "online" ones.  What additional information is needed for "offline"?
> Again, this boils down in my opinion to just the current user session
> being cloned into a persisted "offline" session.
> 
> Admin console screens should be the same for "offline" and user
> sessions.  Main realm session screen has list of applications and the
> number of their online and offline sessions.  Same with the
> application's session page.
> 
> The user session page has a list of sessions with an "offline" column
> checked on or off.  This is the same for user account page.
> 
> 
> 
> --
> Bill Burke
> JBoss, a division of Red Hat
> http://bill.burkecentral.com
>