spring-projects / spring-projects/spring-security

SEC-2692: Tomcat's session fixation protection conflicts with concurrency control

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in: docs type: jira type: task
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Description

George Angeletos (Migrated from SEC-2692) said:

By default in Tomcat 7 the session fixation protection is enabled. That means that if you are using SSL mutual (client-cert) authentication (Tomcat side) and form-login authentication with SS the concurrency control is effectively bypassed.

In order for the CompositeSessionAuthenticationStrategy to properly work the changeSessionIdOnAuthentication attribute must be set to false on the SSLAuthenticator in /conf/context.xml:

<Valve className="org.apache.catalina.authenticator.SSLAuthenticator" changeSessionIdOnAuthentication="false" />

Please add a warning in the documentation (http://docs.spring.io/spring-security/site/docs/3.2.4.RELEASE/reference/htmlsingle/#concurrent-sessions) as it's a big frustration - at least it was for me :)

Regards,
George

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Research direction

Start with the concurrent sessions section of the Spring Security reference documentation linked in the issue and verify the Tomcat 7 session-fixation interaction described there. Done means adding a clear warning about the SSLAuthenticator changeSessionIdOnAuthentication setting for mutual SSL and form-login authentication.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
java, spring
Domain
authentication, documentation
Issue type
Documentation
Difficulty
1/5
Estimated time
Under an hour
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Clearly specified
Newbie friendliness
55/100

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