Would it not be sufficient to generate a virtual session id for each session in 
the whiteboard? This should be possible by customising the Whiteboard’s 
SessionIdManager<https://www.eclipse.org/jetty/javadoc/9.4.8.v20171121/org/eclipse/jetty/server/SessionIdManager.html>
 and 
SessionCache<http://www.eclipse.org/jetty/javadoc/9.4.6.v20170531/org/eclipse/jetty/server/session/SessionCache.html>.
 Obviously this won’t help you when you’re running in a nested whiteboard, but 
it should let you provide separate native Jetty Sessions despite multiplexing.

Tim

On 23 Aug 2018, at 07:19, Carsten Ziegeler 
<cziege...@apache.org<mailto:cziege...@apache.org>> wrote:

I remember a similar discussion about session handling some time ago,
but couldn't find it anymore. I would like to start by describing how it
works today.

The http implementation is registering a single servlet context in the
container (jetty in standalone mode and an app server/servlet engine in
bridged mode running as a webapp) and as the container is managing the
session, there is only a single session regardless of what the http
implementation does.

The http implementation generates one or more http contexts which can be
seen as child contexts of the container servlet context. There is one
for everything registered through the http service and using the http
whiteboard you'll have at least one more, but might have a set of
additional ones. All these contexts share the single container session.
In a bridged scenario the session might even be shared with something
running outside of the OSGi container in the app server.

Each of these http contexts has its own "local" session which can be
created and invalidated. In order to leverage the container session
handling, these local sessions make use of the container session. Due to
that if you invalidate such a local session, the surrounding container
session is not invalidated as this local session has no idea whether
anyone else is also using the container session.

Before FELIX-5819, there was the assumption that if there is nothing
else stored in the container session, the container session can be
invalidated. But that's a weak assumption, it is right in most cases but
wrong in some others.

In the general case I think we can't work around the single container
session. We might be able to create more than one session with a Jetty
based implementation but not in the bridged case. And having separate
sessions per http context poses new problems as this prohibits
exchanging information between different http contexts for a session.

As a immediate workaround we could add the old behaviour back in again -
which invalidates the container session if its empty and make this
configurable. That should solve your immediate problem.

But to be honest, I'm unsure what the right solution should look like.

Regards

Carsten


Rob Walker wrote
Carsten

Been pondering this one some more and thrown some notes down below. Caveat to 
all of them though: I am not so familiar with the recent Felix codebase in this 
area; and my experience of real-world HTTP security definitely has gaps!

So my take is that some apps (obviously not many as we're the 1st to hit this 
in 6 months since the change!) would expected a session invalidate() to destroy 
every aspect of that session. All attributes definitely, and also most would 
expect the ID to be destroyed and not re-used. I haven't checked the Servlet or 
HTTP specs for that last part, maybe it isn’t stated in a contract anywhere. I 
could certainly see apps that hold their session information in some external 
cache not in attributes getting tripped up with narrow timing windows where an 
old session ID comes in again before a cache is cleared. Bad coding by that app 
- sure, almost certainly. But also caught out by non-standard behaviour.

Of course it sounds like we have just as many if not more HTTP whiteboard users 
that would get caught by this changed. I'm not going to argue the current 
re-use of IDs is wrong, and that we need to refactor since we risk breaking 
things for these users, and that is just as bad.

So my proposal is (hopefully) a simple one. We add a property that lets users 
(like us) tripped up by the wrapper behaviour, have the raw Jetty Session 
object returned rather than the wrapper. That way no Felix code gets in the way 
of normal Jetty handling for those not using HTTP whiteboard.

Looking at the code, I think there's a very small number of places this would 
change. Obviously getSession() is one. And then in Dispatcher we'd need to do 
an instanceof test in dispatch before calling getExpiredSessionContextNames. 
And I think again something similar in ServiceController.

We could of course add a higher level wrapper, but that seems to get 
heavyweight.

One added benefit of the above is it allows use of the normal Jetty 
SecureHandler code which does an automatic session invalidate/renew as part of 
the auth steps. But this gets torpedoed by the use of the Felix wrapper due to 
an (admittedly also nasty) instanceof test in the Jetty code.

Cheers

--Rob

-----Original Message-----
From: Rob Walker
Sent: 22 August 2018 18:49
To: Carsten Ziegeler <cziege...@apache.org<mailto:cziege...@apache.org>>; 
dev@felix.apache.org<mailto:dev@felix.apache.org>
Subject: RE: Session invalidation

I didn’t check for that, will take a look. The duplicate ID was what I noticed, 
and one of the things tripping me up.
-R

-----Original Message-----
From: Carsten Ziegeler [mailto:cziege...@apache.org]
Sent: 22 August 2018 17:59
To: dev@felix.apache.org<mailto:dev@felix.apache.org>; Rob Walker 
<r...@ascert.com<mailto:r...@ascert.com>>
Subject: Re: Session invalidation

The new session has the same ID (and I'm not trying to imply that this is 
good), but it should be a different session object being empty

Regards

Carsten


Rob Walker wrote
What I'm seeing is that I get the same session with the same ID back,
and it never gets invalidated. I think it has something to do with the
wrapper not invalidating the delegate.  In our local code I've patched
the wrapper to put the delegate.invalidate() call back, and it seems
then to be creating a new session for me (or returning null) -R

-----Original Message-----
From: Carsten Ziegeler [mailto:cziege...@apache.org]
Sent: 22 August 2018 17:33
To: dev@felix.apache.org<mailto:dev@felix.apache.org>; Rob Walker 
<r...@ascert.com<mailto:r...@ascert.com>>
Subject: Re: Session invalidation

Hmm, maybe I'm missing something here, so you call getSession().invalidate(). 
This should invalidate this session and clear all attributes.

If another request comes in using the same session id, a
getSession(false) should return null.

A getSession() should return a new session which is empty.

So this should follow the servlet API contract.

Or do you experience different results here?

Regards

Carsten


Rob Walker wrote
Well for the short term, I've just copied the source for HttpSessionWrapper 
into our gradle re-bundling  script, and just added back in the 
delegate.invalidate() call at the end. So at least for now, we've got a local 
solution that lets us deal with this.

I'm afraid I'm not sure what the proper / general solution is.

It would seem to me though that the current code doesn't honour the Servlet 
contact i.e. getSession().invalidate() does not invalidate the underlying HTTP 
session.

I'm not sure I fully understood the issue with the http whiteboard as it's not 
a service we use. But it feels like in order to allow that to work, we are 
actually breaking an underlying fundamental operation of HTTP servlets. That 
feels kinda wrong to me, since it could break all sorts of usage. In our case, 
it allows session hijacking by cloning the session ID from the cookie or URL 
parameter. That's a pretty nasty security breach, and one that possibly could 
hit others who are relying on session invalidate to clear tokens.

Anyhow, enough from me, wanted to highlight the issue at least

-Rob

-----Original Message-----
From: Carsten Ziegeler [mailto:cziege...@apache.org]
Sent: 22 August 2018 17:08
To: dev@felix.apache.org<mailto:dev@felix.apache.org>; Rob Walker 
<r...@ascert.com<mailto:r...@ascert.com>>
Subject: Re: Session invalidation

This is a problem of the http whiteboard wrt to session handling. For each 
context managed by the whiteboard you get a separate session. These sessions 
are managed in the real http session.

Now I assume you invalidate one of the per context managed sessions.
This does not invalidate the real http session as the http whiteboard 
implementation does not know whether anything else still wants to use it. 
Imagine you have another application running which happens to use the same http 
session - and that app is not managed by the whiteboard.

The basic idea is that the real session times out eventually.

I'm not sure what a good way of invalidating the http session in this
case is :(

Regards
Carsten

Rob Walker wrote
So one more from me today - I'm a little perplexed on session invalidation.



In common with general security best practice on HTTP, we invalidate
the session ID obtained during initial logon and create a new one
for the auth'd and logged on user. This helps prevent session
sniffing and spoofing because the initial session ID can become visible and 
disclosed.



While updating to newer Felix HTTP Jetty the session ID never seems
to get invalidated. We always seem to get the same ID back even
after we try and invalidate



Digging into the code of HttpSessionWrapper shows that the Jetty
delegate invalidate never gets called.



Here's where it gets weird though. It looks like a mod was committed
by Carsten on 29/3/2018 to explicitly remove the delegate invalidate
quiet recently



SHA-1: f86428f2689e62aafe750d1905fff4f5136ab67e



** FELIX-5819 : Container session should not be invalidated*



git-svn-id: https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/felix/trunk@1827956
13f79535-47bb-0310-9956-ffa450edef68





At which point I get thoroughly confused! Clearly there must be
something I'm missing



----

Rob Walker



cid:image001.jpg@01D39C2C.9DA64510



www.ascert.com

r...@ascert.com

SA +27 21 300 2028

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--
Carsten Ziegeler
Adobe Research Switzerland
cziege...@apache.org<mailto:cziege...@apache.org>

--
Carsten Ziegeler
Adobe Research Switzerland
cziege...@apache.org<mailto:cziege...@apache.org>

--
Carsten Ziegeler
Adobe Research Switzerland
cziege...@apache.org<mailto:cziege...@apache.org>

--
Carsten Ziegeler
Adobe Research Switzerland
cziege...@apache.org<mailto:cziege...@apache.org>

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