I know when we create tokens default token lifetime is 1 hour but I want to change that to 30 minutes.
I want to make tokens available for only 30 minutes to users. For any resource Get-AzAccessToken -ResourceTypeName MSGraph gives token available for 60 minutes.
With this token, users can call graph only within 1 hour. Now I want to make it to reduce to 30 minutes so that after that they have to request new token or the old token should not work.
How to do that? Anyone tried this before?
The default lifetime of an access token is variable. When issued, the default lifetime of an access token is assigned a random value ranging between 60-90 minutes (75 minutes on average).
Lifetime of an access token can be adjusted to control how often the client application expires the application session, and how often it requires the user to reauthenticate (either silently or interactively).
How to do that? Anyone tried this before?
To override the default access token lifetime variation, set a static default access token lifetime by using Configurable token lifetime (CTL).
A token lifetime policy is a type of policy object that contains token lifetime rules. This policy controls how long access, SAML, and ID tokens for this resource are considered valid. Token lifetime policies cannot be set for refresh and session tokens. If no policy is set, the system enforces the default lifetime value.
Refer to these documentations for more information:
On Creating Configurable token lifetime prolicy
Access token lifetime refer to this documentation.
We are using Configurable token lifetimes in Azure Active Directory to change the max session age for multi-factor scenarios. While I've updated the policy with the command below, and confirmed that the access token lifetime changed from the default 60 minutes to 30 minutes, it did not change to 10 minutes as the policy indicates it should below. I've also confirmed it is the default org policy.
Set-AzureADPolicy -Id <OBJECT ID> -DisplayName "OrganizationDefaultPolicyUpdatedScenario" -Definition #('{"TokenLifetimePolicy":{"Version":1,"AccessTokenLifetime":"00:30:00","MaxAgeMultiFactor":"00:11:00","MaxAgeSessionMultiFactor":"00:10:00"}}')
I've checked the JWT token and confirmed exp is 30 minutes, so AccessTokenLifetime is implemented, but I'm using Outlook to test and confirmed MFA. The amr claim is "pwd,mfa".
Indirectly I think the MaxAgeMultiFactor timeout is working, but the session timeout is longer so it is hard to tell.
Why isn't MaxAgeSessionMultiFactor at 10 minutes (the minimum) working?
What am I doing wrong?
Complete policy:
class Policy
{
Id = 2a094bfe-d74e-4d55-906f-7cef8e54746b
OdataType =
AlternativeIdentifier =
Definition =
[
{
"TokenLifetimePolicy":
{
"Version":1,
"AccessTokenLifetime":"00:30:00",
"MaxAgeMultiFactor":"00:11:00",
"MaxAgeSessionMultiFactor":"00:10:00"
}
}
]
DisplayName = OrganizationDefaultPolicyUpdatedScenario
IsOrganizationDefault = True
KeyCredentials =
[
]
Type = TokenLifetimePolicy
}
Generally once access token is obtained, Azure AD will only check for the refresh token at the time of renewal. If the refresh token is also expired, Azure AD will then force the user for a fresh auth and check if MFA is required. If MFA is required, Azure AD will look to see if MFA cookie exists, MFA cookie is valid or not etc.
I see that you have only modified the access token lifetime and MFA lifetimes. So unless your MaxAgeSessionSingleFactor lifetime (Refresh Token) is less than MaxAgeSessionMultiFactor user will not be affected or prompted for MFA. Also single-factor authentication is considered less secure than multi-factor authentication, we recommend that you set MaxAgeSessionSingleFactor property to a value that is equal to or lesser than the Multi-Factor Refresh Token Max Age property(MaxAgeSessionMultiFactor).
With that being said, this feature is being deprecated as described in the article you are following. So we do not recommend using this feature in new environments.
"After hearing from customers during the preview, we're planning to replace this functionality with a new feature in Azure Active Directory Conditional Access. Once the new feature is complete, this functionality will eventually be deprecated after a notification period. If you use the Configurable Token Lifetime policy, be prepared to switch to the new Conditional Access feature once it's available." from the article.
I have created access token using AcquireToken method (with default 1 hour expiration) and tried to login using below command
Add-AzureRmAccount -AccessToken "string" -AccountId "string"
It produces subscription details as expected by successful login.
After this i tried to update policy as below:
Set-AzureADPolicy -ObjectId <ObjectID FROM GET COMMAND> -DisplayName TenantDefaultPolicyUpdatedScenario -Definition #("{`"TokenLifetimePolicy`":{`"Version`":1,`"MaxAgeSingleFactor`":`"2.00:00:00`"}}")
But still token got expired in 1 hour.
Did i missed anything ?
what is the exact procedure and order of updating lifetime of token ?a
after setting policy how to ensure token life time ?
Thanks in advance.
According to this article, you should set AccessTokenLifetime property. Please try to use the following command.
Set-AzureADPolicy -Id <ObjectId FROM GET COMMAND> -DisplayName "OrganizationDefaultPolicyUpdatedScenario" -Definition #('{"TokenLifetimePolicy":{"Version":1,"AccessTokenLifetime":"1.00:00:00"}}')
The following is the snippet from the document.
Access Token Lifetime
String: AccessTokenLifetime
Affects: Access tokens, ID tokens
Summary: This policy controls how long access and ID tokens for this resource are considered valid. Reducing the Access Token Lifetime property mitigates the risk of an access token or ID token being used by a malicious actor for an extended period of time. (These tokens cannot be revoked.) The trade-off is that performance is adversely affected, because the tokens have to be replaced more often.
The MaxAgeSingleFactor property affects Refresh tokens.
Single-Factor Refresh Token Max Age
String: MaxAgeSingleFactor
Affects: Refresh tokens
Summary: This policy controls how long a user can use a refresh token to get a new access/refresh token pair after they last authenticated successfully by using only a single factor. After a user authenticates and receives a new refresh token, the user can use the refresh token flow for the specified period of time. (This is true as long as the current refresh token is not revoked, and it is not left unused for longer than the inactive time.) At that point, the user is forced to reauthenticate to receive a new refresh token.
Reducing the max age forces users to authenticate more often. Because single-factor authentication is considered less secure than multi-factor authentication, we recommend that you set this property to a value that is equal to or lesser than the Multi-Factor Refresh Token Max Age property.
Note: Access token without any expiry is a major security risk and it is not allowed in the Azure.
Default expiration of access token is 1 hour, minimum is 10 minutes, and the maximum is 1 day.
For more details, refer “Configurable token lifetimes in Azure Active Directory (Public Preview)”.
Can somebody explain how to implement sliding expiration using the new Owin WS-Federation plugin?
On the client side, at WS-Fedeartion configuration I see that there are some events like :
Notifications = new WsFederationAuthenticationNotifications
{
SecurityTokenReceived = ...,
AuthenticationFailed = ...,
RedirectToIdentityProvider = ...,
MessageReceived = ...,
SecurityTokenValidated = ....
},
But because the lack of documentation I can't really figure it out where an how?
At the moment my STS is issuing tokens with absolute expiration:
protected override Lifetime GetTokenLifetime(Lifetime requestLifetime)
{
// 5 Minutes for token lifetime
var lifetime = new Lifetime(DateTime.UtcNow, DateTime.UtcNow.AddMinutes(5));
return lifetime;
}
Any help is higly appreciated.
TL;DR: set WsFederationAuthenticationOptions.UseTokenLifetime to false, to re-enable sliding expiration.
In OWIN/Katana, the sliding expiration concept is limited to the cookies middleware and is enabled by default (you can turn it off by setting CookieAuthenticationOptions.SlidingExpiration to false: https://katanaproject.codeplex.com/SourceControl/latest#src/Microsoft.Owin.Security.Cookies/CookieAuthenticationOptions.cs).
When you use app.UseWsFederationAuthentication (or app.UseOpenIdConnectAuthentication), it actually relies on another middleware to persist the ClaimsIdentity when you complete the authentication flow. This "persistence delegation" can be configured through the SignInAsAuthenticationType or via app.SetDefaultSignInAsAuthenticationType.
Typically, this SignInAsAuthenticationType property corresponds to a cookie middleware: this way, sliding expiration is not managed at the WS-Federation middleware level, but by the cookies middleware, that will automatically renew the authentication cookie when sliding expiration conditions are met. In this scenario, the authentication token issued by your identity provider won't be renewed. For this to work, you need to set WsFederationAuthenticationOptions.UseTokenLifetime to false, because when you use the default value, sliding expiration is disabled and the cookie lifetime matches the token lifetime.
If you use WS-Fed for authentication purposes (i.e you just want to know who your users are), using sliding expiration is probably a good idea. But if you need to make some API calls on a remote server, your users may end up being authenticated for a long time, far after the expiration of their security token.
I would like to implement JWT-based authentication to our new REST API. But since the expiration is set in the token, is it possible to automatically prolong it? I don't want users to need to sign in after every X minutes if they were actively using the application in that period. That would be a huge UX fail.
But prolonging the expiration creates a new token (and the old one is still valid until it expires). And generating a new token after each request sounds silly to me. Sounds like a security issue when more than one token is valid at the same time. Of course I could invalidate the old used one using a blacklist but I would need to store the tokens. And one of the benefits of JWT is no storage.
I found how Auth0 solved it. They use not only JWT token but also a refresh token:
https://auth0.com/docs/tokens/refresh-tokens
But again, to implement this (without Auth0) I'd need to store refresh tokens and maintain their expiration. What is the real benefit then? Why not have only one token (not JWT) and keep the expiration on the server?
Are there other options? Is using JWT not suited for this scenario?
I work at Auth0 and I was involved in the design of the refresh token feature.
It all depends on the type of application and here is our recommended approach.
Web applications
A good pattern is to refresh the token before it expires.
Set the token expiration to one week and refresh the token every time the user opens the web application and every one hour. If a user doesn't open the application for more than a week, they will have to login again and this is acceptable web application UX.
To refresh the token, your API needs a new endpoint that receives a valid, not expired JWT and returns the same signed JWT with the new expiration field. Then the web application will store the token somewhere.
Mobile/Native applications
Most native applications do login once and only once.
The idea is that the refresh token never expires and it can be exchanged always for a valid JWT.
The problem with a token that never expires is that never means never. What do you do if you lose your phone? So, it needs to be identifiable by the user somehow and the application needs to provide a way to revoke access. We decided to use the device's name, e.g. "maryo's iPad". Then the user can go to the application and revoke access to "maryo's iPad".
Another approach is to revoke the refresh token on specific events. An interesting event is changing the password.
We believe that JWT is not useful for these use cases, so we use a random generated string and we store it on our side.
In the case where you handle the auth yourself (i.e don't use a provider like Auth0), the following may work:
Issue JWT token with relatively short expiry, say 15min.
Application checks token expiry date before any transaction requiring a token (token contains expiry date). If token has expired, then it first asks API to 'refresh' the token (this is done transparently to the UX).
API gets token refresh request, but first checks user database to see if a 'reauth' flag has been set against that user profile (token can contain user id). If the flag is present, then the token refresh is denied, otherwise a new token is issued.
Repeat.
The 'reauth' flag in the database backend would be set when, for example, the user has reset their password. The flag gets removed when the user logs in next time.
In addition, let's say you have a policy whereby a user must login at least once every 72hrs. In that case, your API token refresh logic would also check the user's last login date from the user database and deny/allow the token refresh on that basis.
Below are the steps to do revoke your JWT access token:
1) When you do login, send 2 tokens (Access token, Refresh token) in response to client .
2) Access token will have less expiry time and Refresh will have long expiry time .
3) Client (Front end) will store refresh token in his local storage and access token in cookies.
4) Client will use access token for calling apis. But when it expires, pick the refresh token from local storage and call auth server api to get the new token.
5) Your auth server will have an api exposed which will accept refresh token and checks for its validity and return a new access token.
6) Once refresh token is expired, User will be logged out.
Please let me know if you need more details , I can share the code (Java + Spring boot) as well.
I was tinkering around when moving our applications to HTML5 with RESTful apis in the backend. The solution that I came up with was:
Client is issued with a token with a session time of 30 mins (or whatever the usual server side session time) upon successful login.
A client-side timer is created to call a service to renew the token before its expiring time. The new token will replace the existing in future calls.
As you can see, this reduces the frequent refresh token requests. If user closes the browser/app before the renew token call is triggered, the previous token will expire in time and user will have to re-login.
A more complicated strategy can be implemented to cater for user inactivity (e.g. neglected an opened browser tab). In that case, the renew token call should include the expected expiring time which should not exceed the defined session time. The application will have to keep track of the last user interaction accordingly.
I don't like the idea of setting long expiration hence this approach may not work well with native applications requiring less frequent authentication.
An alternative solution for invalidating JWTs, without any additional secure storage on the backend, is to implement a new jwt_version integer column on the users table. If the user wishes to log out or expire existing tokens, they simply increment the jwt_version field.
When generating a new JWT, encode the jwt_version into the JWT payload, optionally incrementing the value beforehand if the new JWT should replace all others.
When validating the JWT, the jwt_version field is compared alongside the user_id and authorisation is granted only if it matches.
jwt-autorefresh
If you are using node (React / Redux / Universal JS) you can install npm i -S jwt-autorefresh.
This library schedules refresh of JWT tokens at a user calculated number of seconds prior to the access token expiring (based on the exp claim encoded in the token). It has an extensive test suite and checks for quite a few conditions to ensure any strange activity is accompanied by a descriptive message regarding misconfigurations from your environment.
Full example implementation
import autorefresh from 'jwt-autorefresh'
/** Events in your app that are triggered when your user becomes authorized or deauthorized. */
import { onAuthorize, onDeauthorize } from './events'
/** Your refresh token mechanism, returning a promise that resolves to the new access tokenFunction (library does not care about your method of persisting tokens) */
const refresh = () => {
const init = { method: 'POST'
, headers: { 'Content-Type': `application/x-www-form-urlencoded` }
, body: `refresh_token=${localStorage.refresh_token}&grant_type=refresh_token`
}
return fetch('/oauth/token', init)
.then(res => res.json())
.then(({ token_type, access_token, expires_in, refresh_token }) => {
localStorage.access_token = access_token
localStorage.refresh_token = refresh_token
return access_token
})
}
/** You supply a leadSeconds number or function that generates a number of seconds that the refresh should occur prior to the access token expiring */
const leadSeconds = () => {
/** Generate random additional seconds (up to 30 in this case) to append to the lead time to ensure multiple clients dont schedule simultaneous refresh */
const jitter = Math.floor(Math.random() * 30)
/** Schedule autorefresh to occur 60 to 90 seconds prior to token expiration */
return 60 + jitter
}
let start = autorefresh({ refresh, leadSeconds })
let cancel = () => {}
onAuthorize(access_token => {
cancel()
cancel = start(access_token)
})
onDeauthorize(() => cancel())
disclaimer: I am the maintainer
Today, lots of people opt for doing session management with JWTs without being aware of what they are giving up for the sake of perceived simplicity. My answer elaborates on the 2nd part of the questions:
What is the real benefit then? Why not have only one token (not JWT) and keep the expiration on the server?
Are there other options? Is using JWT not suited for this scenario?
JWTs are capable of supporting basic session management with some limitations. Being self-describing tokens, they don't require any state on the server-side. This makes them appealing. For instance, if the service doesn't have a persistence layer, it doesn't need to bring one in just for session management.
However, statelessness is also the leading cause of their shortcomings. Since they are only issued once with fixed content and expiration, you can't do things you would like to with a typical session management setup.
Namely, you can't invalidate them on-demand. This means you can't implement a secure logout as there is no way to expire already issued tokens. You also can't implement idle timeout for the same reason. One solution is to keep a blacklist, but that introduces state.
I wrote a post explaining these drawbacks in more detail. To be clear, you can work around these by adding more complexity (sliding sessions, refresh tokens, etc.)
As for other options, if your clients only interact with your service via a browser, I strongly recommend using a cookie-based session management solution. I also compiled a list authentication methods currently widely used on the web.
Good question- and there is wealth of information in the question itself.
The article Refresh Tokens: When to Use Them and How They Interact with JWTs gives a good idea for this scenario. Some points are:-
Refresh tokens carry the information necessary to get a new access
token.
Refresh tokens can also expire but are rather long-lived.
Refresh tokens are usually subject to strict storage requirements to
ensure they are not leaked.
They can also be blacklisted by the authorization server.
Also take a look at auth0/angular-jwt angularjs
For Web API. read Enable OAuth Refresh Tokens in AngularJS App using ASP .NET Web API 2, and Owin
I actually implemented this in PHP using the Guzzle client to make a client library for the api, but the concept should work for other platforms.
Basically, I issue two tokens, a short (5 minute) one and a long one that expires after a week. The client library uses middleware to attempt one refresh of the short token if it receives a 401 response to some request. It will then try the original request again and if it was able to refresh gets the correct response, transparently to the user. If it failed, it will just send the 401 up to the user.
If the short token is expired, but still authentic and the long token is valid and authentic, it will refresh the short token using a special endpoint on the service that the long token authenticates (this is the only thing it can be used for). It will then use the short token to get a new long token, thereby extending it another week every time it refreshes the short token.
This approach also allows us to revoke access within at most 5 minutes, which is acceptable for our use without having to store a blacklist of tokens.
Late edit: Re-reading this months after it was fresh in my head, I should point out that you can revoke access when refreshing the short token because it gives an opportunity for more expensive calls (e.g. call to the database to see if the user has been banned) without paying for it on every single call to your service.
I solved this problem by adding a variable in the token data:
softexp - I set this to 5 mins (300 seconds)
I set expiresIn option to my desired time before the user will be forced to login again. Mine is set to 30 minutes. This must be greater than the value of softexp.
When my client side app sends request to the server API (where token is required, eg. customer list page), the server checks whether the token submitted is still valid or not based on its original expiration (expiresIn) value. If it's not valid, server will respond with a status particular for this error, eg. INVALID_TOKEN.
If the token is still valid based on expiredIn value, but it already exceeded the softexp value, the server will respond with a separate status for this error, eg. EXPIRED_TOKEN:
(Math.floor(Date.now() / 1000) > decoded.softexp)
On the client side, if it received EXPIRED_TOKEN response, it should renew the token automatically by sending a renewal request to the server. This is transparent to the user and automatically being taken care of the client app.
The renewal method in the server must check if the token is still valid:
jwt.verify(token, secret, (err, decoded) => {})
The server will refuse to renew tokens if it failed the above method.
How about this approach:
For every client request, the server compares the expirationTime of the token with (currentTime - lastAccessTime)
If expirationTime < (currentTime - lastAccessedTime), it changes the last lastAccessedTime to currentTime.
In case of inactivity on the browser for a time duration exceeding expirationTime or in case the browser window was closed and the expirationTime > (currentTime - lastAccessedTime), and then the server can expire the token and ask the user to login again.
We don't require additional end point for refreshing the token in this case.
Would appreciate any feedack.
Ref - Refresh Expired JWT Example
Another alternative is that once the JWT has expired, the user/system will make a call to
another url suppose /refreshtoken. Also along with this request the expired JWT should be passed. The Server will then return a new JWT which can be used by the user/system.
The idea of JWT is good, you put what you need in JWT and go stateless.
Two problems:
Lousy JWT standardization.
JWT is impossible to invalidate or if created fast-expiring it forces the user to log in frequently.
The solution to 1. Use custom JSON:
{"userId": "12345", "role": "regular_user"}
Encrypt it with a symmetric (AES) algorithm (it is faster than signing with an asymmetric one) and put it in a fast-expiring cookie. I would still call it JWT since it is JSON and used as a token in a Web application. Now the server checks if the cookie is present and its value can be decrypted.
The solution to 2. Use refresh token:
Take userId as 12345, encrypt it, and put it in the long-expiring cookie. No need to create a special field for the refresh token in DB.
Now every time an access token (JWT) cookie is expired server checks the refresh token cookie, decrypts, takes the value, and looks for the user in DB. In case the user is found, generate a new access token, otherwise (or if the refresh token is also expired) force the user to log in.
The simplest alternative is to use a refresh token as an access token, i.e. do not use JWT at all.
The advantage of using JWT is that during its expiration time server does not hit DB. Even if we put an access token in the cookie with an expiration time of only 2 min, for a busy application like eBay it will results in thousands of DB hits per second avoided.
I know this is an old question, but I use a hybrid of both session and token authentication. My app is a combination of micro-services so I need to use token-based authentication so that every micro-service doesn't need access to a centralized database for authentication. I issue 2 JWTs to my user (signed by different secrets):
A standard JWT, used to authenticate requests. This token expires after 15 minutes.
A JWT that acts as a refresh token that is placed in a secure cookie. Only one endpoint (actually it is its own microservice) accepts this token, and it is the JWT refresh endpoint. It must be accompanied by a CSRF token in the post body to prevent CRSF on that endpoint. The JWT refresh endpoint stores a session in the database (the id of the session and the user are encoded into the refresh JWT). This allows the user, or an admin, to invalidate a refresh token as the token must both validate and match the session for that user.
This works just fine but is much more complicated than just using session-based auth with cookies and a CSRF token. So if you don't have micro-services then session-based auth is probably the way to go.
If you are using AWS Amplify & Cognito this will do the magic for you:
Use Auth.currentSession() to get the current valid token or get new if the current has expired. Amplify will handle it
As a fallback, use some interval job to refresh tokens on demand every x minutes, maybe 10 min. This is required when you have a long-running process like uploading a very large video which will take more than an hour (maybe due to a slow network) then your token will expire during the upload and amplify will not update automatically for you. In this case, this strategy will work. Keep updating your tokens at some interval.
How to refresh on demand is not mentioned in docs so here it is.
import { Auth } from 'aws-amplify';
try {
const cognitoUser = await Auth.currentAuthenticatedUser();
const currentSession = await Auth.currentSession();
cognitoUser.refreshSession(currentSession.refreshToken, (err, session) => {
console.log('session', err, session);
const { idToken, refreshToken, accessToken } = session;
// do whatever you want to do now :)
});
} catch (e) {
console.log('Unable to refresh Token', e);
}
Origin: https://github.com/aws-amplify/amplify-js/issues/2560
services.Configure(Configuration.GetSection("ApplicationSettings"));
services.AddMvc().SetCompatibilityVersion(CompatibilityVersion.Version_2_2);
services.AddDbContext<AuthenticationContext>(options =>
options.UseSqlServer(Configuration.GetConnectionString("IdentityConnection")));
services.AddDefaultIdentity<ApplicationUser>()
.AddEntityFrameworkStores<AuthenticationContext>();
services.Configure<IdentityOptions>(options =>
{
options.Password.RequireDigit = false;
options.Password.RequireNonAlphanumeric = false;
options.Password.RequireLowercase = false;
options.Password.RequireUppercase = false;
options.Password.RequiredLength = 4;
}
);
services.AddCors();
//Jwt Authentication
var key = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(Configuration["ApplicationSettings:JWT_Secret"].ToString());
services.AddAuthentication(x =>
{
x.DefaultAuthenticateScheme = JwtBearerDefaults.AuthenticationScheme;
x.DefaultChallengeScheme = JwtBearerDefaults.AuthenticationScheme;
x.DefaultScheme = JwtBearerDefaults.AuthenticationScheme;
}).AddJwtBearer(x=> {
x.RequireHttpsMetadata = false;
x.SaveToken = false;
x.TokenValidationParameters = new Microsoft.IdentityModel.Tokens.TokenValidationParameters
{
ValidateIssuerSigningKey = true,
IssuerSigningKey = new SymmetricSecurityKey(key),
ValidateIssuer = false,
ValidateAudience = false,
ClockSkew = TimeSpan.Zero
};
});
}