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Version: 7.0.x

Session Storage

Sessions allow a user's authentication to be tracked between multiple HTTP requests to a service.

The OAuth2 Proxy uses a Cookie to track user sessions and will store the session data in one of the available session storage backends.

At present the available backends are (as passed to --session-store-type):

The Cookie storage backend is the default backend implementation and has been used in the OAuth2 Proxy historically.

With the Cookie storage backend, all session information is stored in client side cookies and transferred with each and every request.

The following should be known when using this implementation:

  • Since all state is stored client side, this storage backend means that the OAuth2 Proxy is completely stateless
  • Cookies are signed server side to prevent modification client-side
  • It is mandatory to set a cookie-secret which will ensure data is encrypted within the cookie data.
  • Since multiple requests can be made concurrently to the OAuth2 Proxy, this session implementation cannot lock sessions and while updating and refreshing sessions, there can be conflicts which force users to re-authenticate

Redis Storage​

The Redis Storage backend stores sessions, encrypted, in redis. Instead sending all the information back the client for storage, as in the Cookie storage, a ticket is sent back to the user as the cookie value instead.

A ticket is composed as the following:

{CookieName}-{ticketID}.{secret}

Where:

  • The CookieName is the OAuth2 cookie name (_oauth2_proxy by default)
  • The ticketID is a 128 bit random number, hex-encoded
  • The secret is a 128 bit random number, base64url encoded (no padding). The secret is unique for every session.
  • The pair of {CookieName}-{ticketID} comprises a ticket handle, and thus, the redis key to which the session is stored. The encoded session is encrypted with the secret and stored in redis via the SETEX command.

Encrypting every session uniquely protects the refresh/access/id tokens stored in the session from disclosure.

Usage​

When using the redis store, specify --session-store-type=redis as well as the Redis connection URL, via --redis-connection-url=redis://host[:port][/db-number].

You may also configure the store for Redis Sentinel. In this case, you will want to use the --redis-use-sentinel=true flag, as well as configure the flags --redis-sentinel-master-name and --redis-sentinel-connection-urls appropriately.

Redis Cluster is available to be the backend store as well. To leverage it, you will need to set the --redis-use-cluster=true flag, and configure the flags --redis-cluster-connection-urls appropriately.

Note that flags --redis-use-sentinel=true and --redis-use-cluster=true are mutually exclusive.