Session Management

In this section we will cover the most important aspects of session management according to OWASP's Secure Coding Practices. An example is provided along with an overview of the rationale behind these practices. Along with this text, there is a folder which contains the complete source code of the program we will analyze during this article. The flow of the session process can be seen in the following image:

When dealing with session management, the application should only recognize the server's session management controls, and the session's creation should be done on a trusted system. In the code example provided, our application generates a session using JWT. This is done in the following function:

// create a JWT and put in the clients cookie
func setToken(res http.ResponseWriter, req *http.Request) {
  ...
}

We must ensure that the algorithms used to generate our session identifier are sufficiently random, to prevent session brute forcing.

...
token := jwt.NewWithClaims(jwt.SigningMethodHS256, claims)
signedToken, _ := token.SignedString([]byte("secret")) //our secret
...

Now that we have a sufficiently strong token, we must also set the Domain, Path, Expires, HTTP only, Secure for our cookies. In this case the Expires value is in the example set to 30 minutes since we are considering our application a low-risk application.

// Our cookie parameter
cookie := http.Cookie{
    Name: "Auth",
    Value: signedToken,
    Expires: expireCookie,
    HttpOnly: true,
    Path: "/",
    Domain: "127.0.0.1",
    Secure: true
}

http.SetCookie(res, &cookie) //Set the cookie

Upon sign-in, a new session is always generated. The old session is never re-used, even if it is not expired. We also use the Expire parameter to enforce periodic session termination as a way to prevent session hijacking. Another important aspect of cookies is to disallow concurrent login for the same username. This can be done by keeping a list of logged in users, and compare the new login username against said list. This list of active users is usually kept in a Database.

Session identifiers should never be exposed in URL's. They should only be located in the HTTP cookie header. An example of a bad practice is to pass session identifiers as GET parameters. Session data must also be protected from unauthorized access by other users of the server.

Regarding HTTP to HTTPS connection changes, special care should be taken to prevent MITM attacks that sniff and potentially hijack the user's session. The best practice regarding this issue, is to use HTTPS in all requests. In the following example our server is using HTTPS.

err := http.ListenAndServeTLS(":443", "cert/cert.pem", "cert/key.pem", nil)
if err != nil {
  log.Fatal("ListenAndServe: ", err)
}

In case of highly sensitive or critical operations, the token should be generated per-request instead of per-session. Always make sure the token is sufficiently random and has a length secure enough to protect against brute forcing.

The final aspect to consider in session management, is the Logout functionality. The application should provide a way to logout from all pages that require authentication, as well as fully terminate the associated session and connection. In our example, when a user logs out, the cookie is deleted from the client. The same action should be taken on the place where we store our user session information.

...
cookie, err := req.Cookie("Auth") //Our auth token
if err != nil {
  res.Header().Set("Content-Type", "text/html")
  fmt.Fprint(res, "Unauthorized - Please login <br>")
  fmt.Fprintf(res, "<a href=\"login\"> Login </a>")
  return
}
...

The full example can be found in session.go