Introduction¶ ↑

GlobalSession enables multiple heterogeneous Web applications to share session state in a cryptographically secure way, facilitating single sign-on and enabling easier development of distributed applications that make use of architectural strategies such as sharding or separation of concerns.

In other words: it glues your semi-related Web apps together so they share the same bits of session state. This is done by putting the session itself into cookies.

What Is It Not?¶ ↑

This plugin does not provide a complete solution for identity management. In particular, it does not provide any of the following:

federation – aka cross-domain single sign-on – use OpenID for that.
authentication – the application must authenticate the user.
authorization – the application is responsible for using the contents of the global session to make authorization decisions.
secrecy – global session attributes can be signed but never encrypted; protect against third-party snooping using SSL. Group secrecy is expensive; if you don’t want your users to see their session state, put it in a database, or in an encrypted local session cookie.
replication – the authentication authorities must have some way to share information about the database of users in order to authenticate them and place identifying information into the global session.
single sign-out – the authorities must have some way to broadcast a notification when sessions are invalidated; they can override the default Directory implementation to do realtime revocation checking.

Example¶ ↑

1) Create a basic config file and edit it to suit your needs:

$ script/generate global_session_config mycoolapp.com

2) Create an authentication authority:

$ script/generate global_session_authority mycoolapp

3) Declare that some or all of your controllers will use the global session:

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
  has_global_session
end

4) Make use of the global session hash in your controllers:

global_session['user'] = @user.id
...
@current_user = User.find(global_session['user'])

5) For easier programming, enable seamless integration with the local session:

(in global_session.yml)
common:
  integrated: true

(in your controllers)
session['user'] = @user.id #goes to the global session
session['local_thingie'] = @thingie.id #goes to the local session

Global Session Contents¶ ↑

Global session state is stored as a cookie in the user’s browser. The cookie is a Zlib-compressed JSON dictionary containing the following stuff:

session metadata (UUID, created-at, expires-at, signing-authority)
signed session attributes (e.g. the authenticated user ID)
insecure session attributes (e.g. the last-visited URL)
a cryptographic signature of the metadata and signed attributes

The global session is unserialized and its signature is verified whenever a controller asks for one of its attributes. The cookie’s value is updated whenever attributes change. As an optimization, the signature is only recomputed when the metadata or signed attributes have changed; insecure attributes can change “for free.”

Because the security properties of attributes can vary, GlobalSession requires all possible attributes to be declared up-front in the config file. The ‘attributes’ section of the config file defines the schema for the global session: which attributes can be used, which can be trusted to make authorization decisions (because they are signed), and are insecure and therefore act only as “hints” about the session.

Since the session is serialized as JSON, only a limited range of object types can be stored in it: strings, numbers, lists, hashes and other Ruby primitives. Ruby booleans (true/false) do not translate well into JSON and should be avoided.

Detailed Information¶ ↑

Global Session Domain¶ ↑

We refer to collection of all Web application instances capable of using the global session as the “domain.” The global session domain may consist of any number of distinct nodes, possibly hidden behind load balancers or proxies. The nodes within the domain may all be running the same Rails application, or they may be running different codebases that represent different parts of a distributed application. (They may also be using app frameworks other than Rails.)

The only constraint imposed by GlobalSession is that all nodes within the domain must have end-user-facing URLs within the same second-level DNS domain. This is due to limitations imposed by the HTTP cookie mechanism: for privacy reasons, cookies will only be sent to nodes within the same domain as the node that first created them.

For example, in my GlobalSession configuration file I might specify that my cookie’s domain is “example.com”. My app nodes at app1.example.com and app2.example.com would be part of the global session domain, but my business partner’s application at app3.partner.com could not participate.

Authorities and Relying Parties¶ ↑

A node that can create or update the global session is said to be an “authority” (because it’s trusted by other parties to make assertions about global session state). An application that can read the global session is said to be a “relying party.” In practice, every application is a relying party, but not all of them need to be authorities.

There is an RSA key pair associated with each authority. The authority’s public key is distribued to all relying parties, but the private key must remain a secret to that authority (which may consist of many individual nodes).

This system allows for significant flexibility when configuring a distributed app’s global session. There must be at least one authority, but for many apps one authority (plus an arbitrary number of relying parties, which do not need a key pair) will be sufficient.

In general, two systems should be part of the same authority if there is no trust boundary between them – that is to say, trust between the two systems is unlimited in both directions.

Here are some reasons you might consider dividing your systems into different authorities:

beta/staging system vs. production system
system hosted by a third party vs. system hosted internally
e-commerce node vs. storefront node vs. admin node

The Directory¶ ↑

The Directory is a Ruby object instantiated by GlobalSession in order to perform lookups of public and private keys. Given an authority name (as found in a session cookie), the Directory can find the corresponding public key.

If the local system is an authority itself, #local_authority_name will return non-nil and #private_key will return a private key suitable for signing session attributes.

The Directory implementation included with GlobalSession uses the filesystem as the backing store for its key pairs. Its #initialize method accepts a filesystem path that will be searched for files containing PEM-encoded public and private keys (the same format used by OpenSSH). This simple Directory implementation relies on the following conventions:

Public keys have a *.pub extension.
Private keys have a *.key extension.
If a node is an authority, then one (and only one) *.key file should exist.
The local node’s authority name is inferred from the name of the private key file.

When used with a Rails app, GlobalSession expects to find its keystore in config/authorities. You can use the global_session generator to create new key pairs. Remember never to check a *.key file into a public repository!! (*.pub files can be checked into source control and distributed freely.)

If you wish all of the systems to stop trusting an authority, simply delete its public key from config/authorities and re-deploy your app.

Implementing Your Own Directory Provider¶ ↑

To replace or enhance the built-in Directory, simply create a new class that extends Directory and put the class somewhere in your app (the lib directory is a good choice). In the GlobalSession configuration file, specify the class name of the directory under the ‘common’ section, like so:

common:
  integrated: true
  directory: MyCoolDirectory

Sergyenko/global_session