proxy mode not working properly about phpcas HOT 5 CLOSED

Sorry for the delay, I've been on holiday for the past two weeks. I'll try to take a look at this tomorrow. Happy New Year!

from phpcas.

Thanks for finding this issue. Proxy requests that had both a valid session cookie and a proxy ticket were falling through the big isAuthenticated() if/else block and the $res wasn't being set correctly.

from phpcas.

Welcome back Adam.

Just a crazy thought from my side. Why do we even (re)send a ticket if we already have a valid session? I feel that there is a bug underneath:
We either resend an used ticket, we get a new ticket even though it's not necessary or i'm missing something. :D

from phpcas.

I was actually thinking the same thing about resending the tickets, but ran into two issues:

1. Tickets are for one request only:

The following line in the CAS Protocol indicates that proxy tickets are single-use:

3.2.1. proxy ticket properties

   * Proxy tickets MUST only be valid for one ticket validation attempt. Whether or not validation was successful, 
     CAS MUST then invalidate the ticket, causing all future validation attempts of that same ticket to fail.

Because of this, it seems like we shouldn't re-send the first proxy ticket that we obtained for the service since it is guaranteed to be invalid if validation against the CAS server is done.

2. What happens when the service session or CAS session expires?

When a proxy ticket is sent with each service request, the failure mode for service session expiration is to authenticate the new proxy ticket and start a new session. If the CAS session expires, then generating a new proxy ticket will fail in the client's initializeProxiedService(), resulting in a CAS_ProxyTicketException which can be caught by the client application. The client application can then renew authentication and generate a valid proxy ticket before sending the proxied service request again.

If a proxy ticket isn't sent with every request, then when the service session expires the service request will redirect to the CAS login page (similar to the issue that began this thread) since there is no proxy-ticket to validate. A 302 redirect to the CAS login page isn't something that the client can handle as easily a CAS_ProxyTicketException.

If you can think of a solution that would reduce the need to generate extra proxy tickets while still handling session expiration gracefully, I'd be happy to try to implement it.

from phpcas.

I think the solution could be something like interpreting the http status code for any repeat call of an proxied service.
For the first call you always get an PT to access the service. Once you have any(?) cookie for a proxied service you assume it's a valid session cookie of some sort (you can't assume some specific format i guess) and try to access the service without aquiring a new PT. If you recieve any other status than 200 OK you assume you need a new PT and call again with a new PT. I think we are currently doing something similar right now once you have a failure but i haven't had time to check yet.

I think i will have some time on the weekend to dig into this matter.

I haven't really thought it through but i was the first thing that came to my mind.

from phpcas.