CODEWITHSUNDEEP
spring-securitysingle-sign-oncas
nansen
nansen

Reputation: 2962

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?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 4052

Answers (4)

jleleu
jleleu

Reputation: 2699

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 :

  1. 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
  2. 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.

Upvotes: 2

jleleu
jleleu

Reputation: 2699

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 :

  1. create a controller on CAS server side which returns a JSON indicating if the CASTGC has expired or not
  2. 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.

Upvotes: 1

jleleu
jleleu

Reputation: 2699

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 ?

Upvotes: 0

Maksym Demidas
Maksym Demidas

Reputation: 7817

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.

Upvotes: 2

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