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Apache2::Cookie troubles... sanity check needed on auth/sess handling

by jimbus (Friar)
on Apr 03, 2006 at 17:55 UTC ( [id://540986]=perlquestion: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??

jimbus has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

UPDATE I solved the issue, I was setting the path and domain incorrectly. It came down to old fashioned debugging and once I had the tools I needed, I was able to get it done. The tools were the liveHTTPheaders plugin listed below and FireFox's cookie viewer. Between the two, I was able to see the cookie hitting the header, then being saved to the browser and finally check the values to make sure it was what I needed. Many thanks to bart and eric256 for spoon feeding me the blatantly obvious... now to move it to https and add some digesting to the password.

Alright, I'm struggling a bit here and need a sanity check as well as an answer...

I'm using Apache2/mod_perl2/Mason I've been happy with mason, building my business logic and db layer stuff in perl modules, testing them with perl test scripts and then plugging them into the display page, it's all coming together quickly and elegantly... atleast compared the the JSP stuff I'm replacing. Now, I'm trying to do authentication and authorization and I'm starting to stumble.

Based on roles, I want to adjust what a user see on a page, though there will be some redirecting or limiting access. The user authentication and roll information come out of sepparate mysql tables (though not particularly relevant, this will be switch to the corporate LDAP at some point). I'm not currently interested in sessions for tracking or page customization, but again I have to temper this with the fact I am in a corporate setting and I don't have the final say.

I've been basing much of my design philosophy on masonbook.com's aprentice.perl.org example, but they seem to have left out a lot of the logic, or it is baked into the strange OO db they use, so I've been wandering off on my own. There's an autohandler that loads with every page that looks for a user cookie. If it finds the cookie, it digests the user info to see if it matches the digest stored in the cookie at login. If it does, it creates a user object with methods to look up roll information when needed. Otherwise, it assumes you are "Guest" and gives you guest privledges. The user object is in a perl module that has subs to validate the username and password againdst the DB and I will put subs to assess roles and such.

Where this is breaking down, is I can't seem to set or perhaps read the cookies I'm setting and the cookie mechanism seems very "black box"-ish, or at least I can't find any good debuging ideas on Apache2::cookie on cpan or google.

I'd also like to know if I'm approaching this in a sane manner to build things. I've tried googling and rifling the monastary and haven't come up with a good standard or even acceptable practices for this sort of thing. I find things that give specifics on this sort of thing, but not anything that helps me sort out what I want and whats a good way to do it.

Code:

Auth::User
#! /usr/local/perl package User; use strict; sub validate { my $self = (); shift; $self->{dbh} = shift; $self->{username} = shift; $self->{passwd} = shift; $self->{qstr} = "select count(user_name) from users where user_name = + \'$self->{username}\' and user_pass = \'$self->{passwd}\'"; $self->{error_msg} = "Invalid Login"; $self->{res} = undef; bless($self); my $q_stmt = $self->{dbh}->prepare($self->{qstr}); $q_stmt->execute(); my @data = $q_stmt->fetchrow_array(); if (@data[0] == 1) { $self->{res} = 1; } return($self); } sub guest { my $self = (); shift; $self->{dbh} = shift; $self->{username} = "Guest"; $self->{logged_in} = undef; $self->{passwd} = ""; bless($self); return($self); } sub is_logged_in { my $self = shift; return $self->{logged_in}; } 1;
autohandler
<%once> $AuthDBH = DBI->connect('dbi:mysql:authority:10.33.8.159', 'appadmin', + 'f00tbal l') or die "poop sandwich"; $RepDBH = DBI->connect('dbi:mysql:reports:10.33.8.159', 'appadmin', 'f +00tball') or die "poop sandwich"; use Auth::User; use Digest::SHA1; </%once> <%init> my %cookies = Apache2::Cookie->fetch($r); my $guest = User->guest; my $user; if (exists $cookies{user_login}) { my %user_info = $cookies{user_login}->value; if ( $user_info{used_id} && $user_info{MAC}) { my $MAC = Digest::SHA1::sha1_hex($user_info{user_id}, "Get the S1 +gnal!"); if ( $user_info{MAC} eq $MAC ) { $user = User->new($user_info{used_id}); } } } local $User = $user || $guest; $m->call_next </%init> <%flags> inherit=>undef </%flags>
Login
<%init> my $item; my $date; my @line; #Yes, I am sending a plain text password here... I'll digest it in SHA +1 in the next step my $res = User->validate($AuthDBH, $ARGS{username}, $ARGS{password}); my $url; if (length($ARGS{ret_url}) <= 1) { $url = "/index.html"; } if ($res->{res}) { my $MAC = Digest::SHA1::sha1_hex($ARGS{username}, "Get the S1gnal!"); Apache2::Cookie->new ( $r, -name => 'user_login', -value => { user_id => $ARGS{username}, MAC => $MAC }, -path => '/', -domain => 'ruth.dobson.net', -expires => '+1M', )->bake($r); } else { if (index($ARGS{ret_url}, '?') >= 0) { $url .= "&login_error=$res->{error_msg}"; } else { $url .= "?login_error=$res->{error_msg}"; } } $url= "/test.html"; $m->redirect($url); </%init> <%flags> inherit=> '/syshandler' </%flags>

--Jimbus aka Jim Babcock
Wireless Data Engineer and Geek Wannabe
jim-dot-babcock-at-usa-dot-com

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Apache2::Cookie troubles... sanity check needed on auth/sess handling
by clinton (Priest) on Apr 04, 2006 at 08:28 UTC
    A quick grok of your code suggests that the problem is here :

    Apache2::Cookie->new ( $r, -name => 'user_login', -value => { user_id => $ARGS{username}, MAC => $MAC }, -path => '/', -domain => 'ruth.dobson.net', -expires => '+1M', )->bake($r); $url= "/test.html"; $m->redirect($url);

    Calling cookie->bake puts your cookie headers the response headers, but then you request a redirect, which is not a 200 response, and so the standard page headers do not get sent.

    Instead of using bake, you need to set your err_headers_out, which will get sent regardless of the response code.

    See here for a recipe : Sending Cookies in REDIRECT Response handlers

      Based on the recipe, I updated the following to the login page

      if ($res->{res}) { my $MAC = Digest::SHA1::sha1_hex($ARGS{username}, "Get the S1gnal!") +; my $cookie = Apache2::Cookie->new ( $r, -name => 'user_login', -value => { user_id => $ARGS{username}, MAC => $MAC }, -path => '/', -domain => 'ruth.dobson.net', -expires => '+1M', ); $r->err_headers_out->add('Set-Cookie' => $cookie); }

      It didn't change any thing. is there any way to, if I stop before the redirect, to check and see what whas set or check someplace to see what is happening when I submit the cookie? I'm not sure how to go about debugging this.


      --Jimbus aka Jim Babcock
      Wireless Data Engineer and Geek Wannabe
      jim-dot-babcock-at-usa-dot-com
        $r->err_headers_out->add('Set-Cookie' => $cookie->as_string);
        To debug cookie problems, use a browser that shows the headers (lwp-request, Firefox with LiveHTTPHeaders, a logging proxy).
Re: Apache2::Cookie troubles... sanity check needed on auth/sess handling
by badaiaqrandista (Pilgrim) on Apr 05, 2006 at 02:05 UTC

    I think it's because you set an anonymous hash as the value for the cookie. Apache2::Cookie expects a string for the '-value'. So either you send two cookies, one holds the username and another one holds the MAC, or you serialize it with Storable::freeze when sending it and deserialize it when getting it with Storable::thaw.

    However, I would just join them with comma when sending, and split them when receiving.

    On debugging: use the good old 'warn' and 'Data::Dumper::Dumper' combination, printing everything to the apache error log. If you don't have access to the log, just print them to the browser.

    --------------
    badaiaqrandista
Re: Apache2::Cookie troubles... sanity check needed on auth/sess handling
by jimbus (Friar) on Apr 19, 2006 at 19:33 UTC

    OK, I've not made any progress on this an I'm getting a bit frustrated. Some notes on the other comments and what I've done:

  • Apache::Cookie->bake calls  $r->err_headers_out->add('Set-Cookie' => $cookie) and thats all it does.
    81: sub bake { 82: my ($c, $r) = @_; 83: $r->err_headers_out->add("Set-Cookie", $c->as_string); 84: }
  • I used all the typical debug stuff and I'm absolutely sure the values I think are going are there, what I can't see is what's happening with the cookie.
  • I installed LiveHTTPHeaders on firefox and I'm getting cookie set in both the request and response header if I stop the page from forwarding, but once I let mason forward back to the URL passed in, it is in neither.

    The latest version of the code is

    <%init> use Apache2::Const -compile => qw(REDIRECT); my $item; my $date; my @line; my $res = User->validate($AuthDBH, $ARGS{username}, $ARGS{password}); my $url = "/"; if (length($ARGS{ret_url}) > 1) { $url = $ARGS{ret_url}; } if ($res->{res}) { my $MAC = Digest::SHA1::sha1_hex($ARGS{username}, "Get the S1gnal!") +; my $cookie = Apache2::Cookie->new ( $r, -name => 'user_login', -value => { $ARGS{username} . "," . $MAC }, # -path => '/', # -domain => '.dobson.net', -expires => '+1M', ); $r->err_headers_out ->add('Set-Cookie' => $cookie->as_string); $r->headers_out->set(Location => $url); # return Apache2::Const::REDIRECT; } else { if (index($ARGS{ret_url}, '?') >= 0) { $url .= "&login_error=$res->{error_msg}"; } else { $url .= "?login_error=$res->{error_msg}"; } } #$url= "/index.html"; $m->redirect($url); </%init> <%flags> inherit=> '/syshandler' </%flags> <% $url %> login_submit.html: 65 lines, 1088 characters.

    I keep rereading the responses sent and trying a million different variations from references I've googled up... this cannot be this difficult.

    Thanks


    --Jimbus aka Jim Babcock
    Wireless Data Engineer and Geek Wannabe
    jim-dot-babcock-at-usa-dot-com

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