Session Time out handling in Spring Security - spring-security

I have a problem regarding the Session Timeout handling in Spring Security in our spring application. Actually the application is configure for 1 hour session timeout in SiteMinder. So after 1 hour, the application session is timed out. After session time out if we do any operation on the page, instead of redirecting the user to invalidsession.jsp, as its configured in our security-context.xml file. Currently when we click on the submit button a search button, an ajax call is made and its giving a wrong message saying records are not found, which is confusing for the user. How to handle this issue in such a way that after session time out, instead of ajax call, the application should redirect to invalidsession.jsp

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Rails CSRF Expiration Time

I've got a issue where some users that go idle on my site for a period of time receive a CSRF error when submitting post requests. I don't want to disable the security feature in Rails because of its importance, so I was thinking to display a page timeout alert instead. However I cannot find anywhere what the Rails default timeout is for the authenticity_token. Can someone please point me in the right direction?
Thanks in advance.
UPDATE
When I look at cookies for my site Chrome shows that the session cookie expires when the browsing session ends. If that's the case and the reason that I get the CSRF error is due to an expired session, how does it expire if the browser is never closed?
The default behavior is for the CSRF protection to use cookie-based sessions, and for the cookies to expire when the session expires. It sounds like the session is expiring, causing the CSRF error.

CAS and Spring-Security: regularly check if a ticket has expired

I have a CAS-Server and a Client configured via Spring-Security. Single Sign On and Single Logout are working fine so far.
I'm still facing an issue with session timeout. As I understand the ticket expiration policy is not affected by idleness of the secured CAS client side session. So a client must actively revalidate a ticket to see if it has expired and is not being posted the expiration event by the CAS server as it is the case when a single logout is performed.
To force my spring secured client to regularly check for the expiration of the ticket I might set the session timeout to a low value like a minute or so. But that has the drawback of all my session data to be removed. Not very user friendly.
Is there a way to tell spring-security to regularly check if a ticket is still valid without destroying the user session first?
I would be pretty confident on the Javascript solution as it's just a simple check to force local logout. Though, it needs to customize your CAS server, that you cannot do.
You have the solution of having a shorter session on application side to force regular re-authentication, but this means that you will invalidate often your application session and recreate it.
A better solution can be based on the gateway parameter of the CAS protocol : using this parameter will not produce a service ticket if you are not SSO authenticated. So you could have :
an application filter which, every 5 minutes, saves the current url, triggers a CAS round-trip with gateway=true and a specific service : http://myserver/myapp/checkCasSession
a specific url : /checkCasSession : if it receives a service ticket, everything is ok, the CAS session is still valid, it just restores the original url. If there is no service ticket, the local session must end and a local logout is triggered.
I think there is no such way. Spring Security and Spring Security Cas are implemented as a set of Servlet API filters / listeners. So Spring Security Cas works only during some Http request / Session event processing. I do not view any dependency on some scheduling library for spring-security-cas.jar.
It's not an easy problem you can address out of the box with Spring Security. You need to work on both sides : client and server. I would :
create a controller on CAS server side which returns a JSON indicating if the CASTGC has expired or not
every 5 minutes (for example) and each time an application page is displayed, add some javascript to call this specific CAS controller and if the CAS session has ended, ends also the application session.
You need to call the CAS server from front channel as the CAS session is held by the CASTGC cookie.
You have two sessions : the application one with its idle timeout and the CAS one with idle / hard timeouts. After having accessed the application through CAS login, the application session lives on its own and can last more than the CAS session. It's generally not a problem. What use case do you want to handle ?

Handling LTPA token timeout (websphere 7.x) in JSF richfaces 3.3

I am using JSF richfaces 3.3 on websphere server 7.x.
The problem is when
user logged in to the application using a browser window and had kept it open for more than LTPA token time out time then LTPA token expiration exception is occurring. Then page is not redirecting to the "logout" page configured. But it getting redirected to the Login page and after successful login then a weird xml page is displayed.
I understand that this is happening because on LTPA token time out when we try to access a JSF resource, as no authentication details are present page is being redirected to login page.
Then as no proper session is present Faces context is still trying to access previous session JSF tree this exception is occurring.
So Question is: How to handle this scenario of LTPA token time out in JSF richfaces3.3?
P.S.: Page is getting redirected to "logout" page on web session expiration.
Vamshi,
If the LTPA token has expired and you try to access a secured resource it will naturally take you to the login page.
That is the expected behaviour!
After you login again you go back to the page you had requested. Depending on your app, either a new HTTPSession is created or it might not even be created during this.
The application should be built to handle this. One approach could be to redirect the user to the main page of the application stating that required information is not available and that you are redirecting the user (after examining the HTTP Session for required information)
HTH

Shared session timeout in a EAI + sso scenario

While using a SSO to integrate between disparate "web applications", the user might switch back and forth between these applications. As the user navigates between these applications, a local session gets created on each of the applications in addition to a session created at the Identity Provider that is used for sso.
So, the issue is when applications have different session timeouts, leading to a broken user experience. Session timeout occurs in one application while the user is working on another application. When navigating back into the application the user had visited previously, an error occurs. This is confusing to the user, since they are not aware that they are working on different applications.
One way to avoid the problem is to have a "global session" object that every application has access to. While the user is accessing any protected resource, the application checks if the global session exists and updates its timestamp before processing the request. The local sessions will never expire (or have a very long timeout). However, when the user logs out, global session object is evicted and the sign out happens on all the applications.
This seems to be a bit heavy handed due to:
Global session object becomes single point of failure
The performance to make a "out of process" check for the global
session object and update the timestamp on access of every
protected request
Any other thoughts on how to make this work?
When navigating back into the application the user had
visited previously, an error occurs.
I don't think that would be an error. The application will redirect the request to SSO provider and as the user is already have a valid SSO session it will be a successful SSO operation and the application can re establish a new/expired session.

Handling cookies with Flex for Authentication

I'm using Flex 4(beta2) with Ruby on Rails 2.3.5 and using RubyAMF to transfer data back and forth between Flex and server.
I set up Authlogic on the Rails side for authentication.
I wasn't sure what's the best method to handle user sessions. I know this is done automatically with Rails by sending session id with cookie which Rails use to authenticate the user.
What do you suggest the best way to do this with Flex?
I thought of couple of options:
1. Manually fetching the cookie from the browser and then figuring our a way to send that to the server with every request I send.
2. Handling sessions expiration and flow on Flex side by manually expiring the session
Do you have other suggestion or recommendation?
Thanks,
Tam
Network requests in Flash use the browser networking stack so cookies in Flex work just like any other browser application. Usually authentication in Flex is no different than it is with a standard web application. Send credentials to the server which it correlates with a session id. Every subsequent request (RemoteObject, HTTPService, etc) also sends that session id.
We have seen that the flash plug-in propagates the session cookie when we do blazeDS (http) remote calls
In the past we have worked with BlaseDS and HTTPServices. In both the cases the request is sent to the server over HTTP. Our server stack as Java (JBoss to be specific).
We noticed that the flex client used to send the session information with the requests to the server. We used same information to store and fetch Principal on the server.
In one case, we propagated the token to the client. This was to avoid multiple submits for same requests - hence we used the common HTML submission approach of token generation where with every response carries with itself a new token and the client has to sent it back to the server for executing the next request.
For the session expiration, there is a good chance that a user is working on the client for any local needs and not working with the server which may have caused a expiration on the server without impacting the server. In this case, we disabled the session expiration on the server and wrote custom code to handle events - keyboard and mouse on the flex client. If the application was not used for a specified time, the flex client would expire both the sessions i.e. local and server
What do you suggest the best way to do this with Flex?
$loggedIn=Authenticate::isAuthenticated();
if(!$loggedIn)return false;
$user=Authenticate::getAuthUser();
First Authenticate the user and if he is logged in create the session. Include this in your every PHP or Ruby file, and check it. Send the Session ID to Flex to maintain the state and you set the time for your session to expire.
The above code does check, whether the user is authenticate to access the PHP or ruby class files.

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