spring-projects / spring-projects/spring-session

Session timeout handling in Spring Security not working

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status: waiting-for-triage
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Java
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Description

When attempting to add spring-session to an existing Spring MVC project with spring-security, I get the following behavior (EDIT: with tomcat's session-timeout set to 1 minute for testing):

  • With the springSessionRepositoryFilter filter in web.xml commented-out, I am correctly booted to the login screen after a minute of inactivity
  • With the springSessionRepositoryFilter filter in web.xml active, I can continue to use the app at least 5 minutes after the last activity

Besides that, everything seems to work as expected - the session is persisted in redis & across webapp restarts, and logging out manually correctly invalidates the session.

Some snippets of my configuration - here is the invalid session handler configuration for spring-security, that will cause expired sessions to be redirected to a login page:

    ...
    <beans:bean id="sessionManagementFilter" class="org.springframework.security.web.session.SessionManagementFilter">
        <beans:constructor-arg name="securityContextRepository">
            <beans:bean class="org.springframework.security.web.context.HttpSessionSecurityContextRepository"/>
        </beans:constructor-arg>
        <beans:property name="invalidSessionStrategy">
            <beans:bean class="my.CustomInvalidSessionStrategy"/>
        </beans:property>
    </beans:bean>
    ...
    <http>
        ...
        <custom-filter position="SESSION_MANAGEMENT_FILTER" ref="sessionManagementFilter"/>
        ...
        <logout delete-cookies="true" invalidate-session="true" logout-url="/signout.html" success-handler-ref="logoutSuccessHandler"/>
    </http>

The web.xml 's filter chain looks like:

    <filter>
        <filter-name>springSessionRepositoryFilter</filter-name>
        <filter-class>org.springframework.web.filter.DelegatingFilterProxy</filter-class>
    </filter>
    <filter-mapping>
        <filter-name>springSessionRepositoryFilter</filter-name>
        <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
    </filter-mapping>

    <filter>
        <filter-name>springSecurityFilterChain</filter-name>
        <filter-class>org.springframework.web.filter.DelegatingFilterProxy</filter-class>
    </filter>

    <filter-mapping>
        <filter-name>springSecurityFilterChain</filter-name>
        <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
    </filter-mapping>

And (one of) the spring context files loaded contains:

    <bean class="org.springframework.session.data.redis.config.annotation.web.http.RedisHttpSessionConfiguration"/>

    <bean class="org.springframework.security.web.session.HttpSessionEventPublisher"/>

    <bean class="org.springframework.data.redis.connection.jedis.JedisConnectionFactory"/>

I apologize if this has been asked before - I've been browsing around the issues related to session timeouts and/or spring security, but they seem to either be about concurrency limits or seemed to pre-date the "HttpSessionEventPublisher", which appears to be the solution to this. Hopefully I'm just missing something really obvious!

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by reproducing the timeout with the web.xml springSessionRepositoryFilter mapping enabled and compare it with the springSecurityFilterChain behavior. Read RedisHttpSessionConfiguration, SessionManagementFilter, HttpSessionSecurityContextRepository, and HttpSessionEventPublisher to trace session expiry and filter ordering. Done means identifying why expiry is not reaching Spring Security and verifying the expected redirect after the configured timeout.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
java, redis, spring
Domain
authentication, backend
Issue type
Bug
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
35/100

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