[Yanel-dev] Auto Login

Tue May 17 08:15:08 CEST 2011

Hi Michael,
I think it is not a good idea to store the token in the user profile. Read
my consolidated thoughts about the auto-login:

- In order to give a realm flexibility on HOW the autologin gets
implemented, I would suggest that you can configure (per realm) an
AutoLoginService (e.g. in the realms.xml) which gets called by the
YanelServlet. This way you don't have to worry about all the details now
(what to store where and how, etc.) because these are then up to the realm's
implementation (if it wants to use Auto-Login). - Given this design you can
later introduce a DefaultAutoLoginServiceImpl class which a realm can use if
they are happy with how that implementation does handle the autologin.

- The AutoLoginService gets called by the YanelServlet for EACH
request that is NOT BOUND to any session yet (so that equals to the
first request per session).
- So the AutoLoginServive would get the Yanel Environment object (via
that it has access to request, response, session, etc., --> the
session must be created before the AutoLoginService gets called, it
might want to store values in it).
- In general I think we need to extend the DefaultAuthenticatorImpl in
Yanel so that you can "login" the user by just providing the username.

My points regarding the AutoLoginService:

- Define NEW COOKIE (e.g. YANEL_AUTOLOGIN, it contains userID and a TOKEN)
- Verify that the user is really not logged in yet. If logged in --> return.
- The TOKEN must be found VERY QUICKLY, we can not go through 10'000
user profiles and look for the token --> Either store it as a seperate
XML (data/autologin/<tokenid>.xml , or we save in a separate index (at
Zwischengas we use an internal index for that already, separated from
the actual content data)
- In the TOKEN DATA file (retrieved from token XML or Index), we get
the userid for this token. It must match the userid provided from the
COOKIE.
- If it matches and the token has not yet expired, we do the login for
this user WITHOUT password.

I currently wonder whether we really have to renew the TOKEN in the
Autologin-Cookie, we could also keep it (like the Yanel-Cookie). What
do you think?

Cheers
Balz

On Tue, May 17, 2011 at 7:31 AM, <baszero at gmail.com> wrote:

> hi michael
>
> i would rather store it in the user profile xml and not in the meta
> property.
>
> cheers
>
>
> _____________________
> CTO / Zwischengas AG
> www.zwischengas.com
>
> Sent via iPhone
>
> On 16.05.2011, at 23:04, Michael Wechner <michael.wechner at wyona.com>
> wrote:
>
> Hi Balz
>
> On 5/16/11 5:06 PM, basZero wrote:
>
> Hi Michael,
>
>  as just discussed, what I meant by "auto-login" is not just pre-filling
> the username field in the login form.
>
>
> sorry, right, I misunderstood
>
> By "auto-login", I mean the following:
>
>  - the user accesses ANY page within my realm
> - at every request it is verified whether the user is logged in (means:
> getIdentity() != null ?)
> - if there is no identity available, the request is checked for the
> autologin cookie
> - if there is no autologin cookie, proceed as usual (= user remains
> anonymous)
> - if there IS an autologin cookie, the user gets authenticated
> automatically (without seeing any form or the need of pressing a submit
> button) and the user is logged in.
>
>
> sounds good also from a peformance/scalability point of view, except it's
> unclear to me where
> we should save the tokens persistently and how to clean them if they have
> expired.
>
> I guess we could save them together with the user profile, e.g.
>
> getRealm().getIdentityManager().getUserManager().getUser("baszero").setProperty("autologin-token",
> TOKEN-ID);
>
> WDYT?
>
> Thanks
>
> Michael
>
>
>  *Implementation:*
> The standard way of how this usually gets implemented is as follows:
> - The cookie contains USERID, TOKEN
> - After every successful authentication, a new TOKEN gets created and
> stored in the COOKIE (for the next time). The realm also stores the new
> token for this user (so that it can be verified the next time).
> - How to do the authentication: the token from the cookie must match the
> last stored token for this user. if it matches, the user gets logged in
> without the need of the password.
>
>  A normal side effect of this implementation is:
> - if the user uses a web browser and for instance an iPad, every time he
> switches the device, the token obviously does not match anymore and he has
> to login by the usual login form where he enters username and password (and
> where he can checkbox the autologin feature again).
>
>  *Next steps for Yanel:*
> It would be great if this functionality could be plugged into the request
> pipeline of Yanel.
> An alternative is to write a Request Pipeline Filter for TOMCAT so that the
> request goes through that servlet each time.
>
>  What do you propose?
>
>  Cheers
> Balz
>
>
> On Mon, May 16, 2011 at 4:48 PM, Michael Wechner <<michael.wechner at wyona.com>
> michael.wechner at wyona.com> wrote:
>
>> Hi Balz
>>
>>
>> On 5/16/11 4:09 PM, basZero wrote:
>>
>>> Hi Michael,
>>>
>>> you once mentioned that Yanel comes out of the box with an auto login
>>> feature?
>>> Can you point me to the source code? I didn't find it.
>>>
>>
>>  Have a look at
>>
>>
>> src/webapp/src/java/org/wyona/yanel/servlet/security/impl/DefaultWebAuthenticatorImpl.java
>>
>> and search for
>>
>> remember-my-login-name
>>
>> (also see rememberLoginNameCookie.setMaxAge(86400); // 1 day is 86400
>> seconds)
>>
>> (also see src/webapp/xslt/login-screen.xsl)
>>
>> HTH
>>
>> Michael
>>
>>
>>> I just want to see how it is done.
>>>
>>> Cheers
>>> Balz
>>>
>>
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>
>
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