[keycloak-dev] Sticky sessions in backchannel requests

[Marek Posolda]

On 19/05/17 10:30, Stian Thorgersen wrote:
> Why do you need a separate route.id <http://route.id> param? Wouldn't 
> it just rely on the session_state being the same value as the 
> authentication session cookie?
Yes, that's also an option.
>
> The cookie approach with our adapters seems sensible option. Not sure 
> about the approach of looking into the code/JWT as we can't rely on 
> the load balancer implementation. There's loads of them out there and 
> we need a solution that works regardless of the load balancer.
I know we can't rely on used loadbalancer. However in some cases, people 
may start their environment from scratch. If we have optimized solution 
for some loadbalancers (wildfly/undertow based. Maybe nginx and HAProxy 
as those seem to be quite popular) it won't be bad?

For example the development of undertow handler to be used together with 
Wildfly based mod_cluster loadbalancer won't be hard to do. Maybe the 
bigger challenge is testing and maintenance.
>
> One option if possible is on demand replication of sessions. A session 
> lives in one DC until it's requested from another DC. That means if 
> users use only apps that can be sticked to a DC either by cookie or 
> some other mechanism (for example the app itself is replicated in all 
> DCs) the session won't be replicated. If/when a user hits a third 
> party app or another app that for some reason is directed to the other 
> DC that session is fetched from the other DC and replicated afterwards.
Yes, I sent something around that in another mail today on keycloak-dev. 
It seems to me that we may need asynchronous requests to not block 
undertow worker thread waiting for userSession to be fetched from the 
other DC?

Also I wonder how bad it is to have option of userSession replicated 
directly between DCs through ASYNC channel? In other words, when 
userSession is created, it is replicated directly to other DCs by ASYNC 
way. It means that worker in the other DCs won't need to block so big 
time until userSession is fetched from the second DC and/or userSession 
may be already available there. But obviously there is price to pay that 
more communication will happen between DC, as it may result in 
replicating userSessions, which won't be needed in second DC at all.

Marek
>
>
> On 16 May 2017 at 10:19, Marek Posolda <mposolda at redhat.com 
> <mailto:mposolda at redhat.com>> wrote:
>
>     I was thinking about possibilities how to solve the issue with sticky
>     sessions in backchannel requests. It seems that we need to support the
>     scenarios, when backchannel requests won't be able to share the sticky
>     session cookie with the browser. However in many cases it may be
>     possible that backchannel requests can participate in the "sticky
>     session", which will have great advantage for performance. Some
>     thoughts:
>
>     - OAuth code (the one used in code-to-token backchannel request)
>     can be
>     JWT signed by realm HMAC key. One of the claims in the code could be
>     "route-id"
>
>     - Refresh tokens will also contain "route-id" claim
>
>     - Keycloak OIDC adapters will be able to read the "route-id" from the
>     code and they will attach sticky session information to the single
>     backchannel request. Hence the backchannel request will be able to
>     participate in sticky session and will be properly routed by
>     loadbalancer to the correct node. Same for requests using refresh
>     token.
>
>     - It seems we will need some flexibility how is the "sticky session"
>     added to the request to support various loadbalancers (cookie,
>     path-parameters etc). Maybe we need some SPI on adapter side? Or just
>     some kind of expressions/tokens, which will help to configure how
>     exactly will cookie/path parameter look like?
>
>     - Keycloak.js adapter seems to be working already. Ajax requests are
>     re-sending the browser cookies and they are available in backchannel
>     endpoint on server-side. This is true even if AUTH_SESSION_ID
>     cookie is
>     httpOnly. I've tested with Firefox, Chrome, my mobile phone. Not
>     sure if
>     this is different in other browsers/devices (cordova etc)?
>
>     - For SAML backchannel requests (backchannel logout), we can add the
>     same to our own SAML adapters though.
>
>     - If people use 3rd party adapters, they won't have this. However
>     we can
>     also have support for some loadbalancers to route the requests
>     directly
>     based on the content of the route-id inside code (or refresh
>     token). In
>     many cases, customers will already have established loadbalancer in
>     their deployments. However some others might be starting their
>     deployment from the scratch and we can suggest them to use some of our
>     preferred loadbalancers though.
>
>     I've checked that if wildfly+mod_cluster is used as loadbalancer, we
>     have the flexibility to inject custom undertow handler, which will be
>     able to look into JWT and add the route info to the
>     HttpServerExchange,
>     from where mod_cluster will read it. Maybe we can investigate this
>     possibility in the other popular loadbalancers (nginx etc) ?
>
>     So in summary: Backchannel requests won't be able to participate in
>     sticky session just if: 3rd party adapter is used AND customer
>     can't use
>     our preferred loadbalancer.
>
>     WDYT?
>
>     Marek
>
>     _______________________________________________
>     keycloak-dev mailing list
>     keycloak-dev at lists.jboss.org <mailto:keycloak-dev at lists.jboss.org>
>     https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/keycloak-dev
>     <https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/keycloak-dev>
>
>