I have a few domains all on the same server, with the same IP and the same databases - that can be accessed by all 5 of the domains.
I have recently remade my login system, so that on my main domain, the cookie works for not only the main domain but the sub domains as well. What this means is that if a user logs into one area, they are signed in everywhere. Which is great! I write a cookie with their hash (taken from the DB) and check for that when loading each page, and they are automatically securely signed in.
This is lovely, but the problem then comes when switching domains, as cookies seem to be locked down to domains. So my other domain (lets call it domain2.com) cannot read the cookie from domain1.com.
Are there any clever ways around this? I could write something to the database, such as IP, but that wouldnt be very secure as the company i work for everyone is on the same IP and therefore it wouldnt be specific.
Or I thought about maybe including a hidden iframe on the page, which actually links to a page on the main server, and pulls the information that way somehow.
I am not sure, but I am sure it can be done. Any ideas?
Browsers, for good reasons, do not allow cookies to be read from any other domain.
What you can do is have domain2.com redirect to a page on domain1.com which checks if the user is logged in and if they are it redirects back to domain2.com with the user's id which can then log them in.
You should not depending on original PHP session functions Collections.
Here is what I have done :
After login success , Server side should return a "session ID" to the browser and store by JavaScript or some how, mean while the "session ID" should be store in database as a successful signal and you do a login time next to the session ID if you needed.
Now you can share the session ID in any IP server you want and make your client connect to(some trick like you redirect to the new domain and post the SID) then establish a PHP session.
I have one user portal account. I'm logging into it with two different usernames in two different tabs.
When I do a hard refresh (ctl+f5) in both tabs of the same user account, it opens in both tabs. That can be any username from those two. What can I do to fix this problem?
Session's mechanism uses COOKIEs. COOKIEs are shared between tabs.
If you what to login with one browser session by two differnet users you can disable storing session id in cookie: PHP session without cookies.
Also you can use feature of browsers. FireFox's Private browsing for example.
PHP's sessions. Basic usage.
PHP's sessions. Passing the Session ID.
You cant login on same website on same browser with two different user. Better you use two different browsers.
One option would be to avoid session cookies. Add the PHPSESSID variable to the query string, or have it in the path and use URL rewriting or PATH_INFO to translate /x/y.php/925235a... etc to /x/y.php?PHPSESSID=925235a.... You can actually tell PHP to do the first for you.
Note, in order for this to work, you'll need to say something like
ini_set('session.use_cookies', false);
or the like, in your script before calling session_start(). Then PHP won't send session cookies; in most cases it will just transparently rewrite URLs in your page to include the session ID, so you get the first option for free.
The biggest drawback to this approach is that it makes your users vulnerable to an attack called "session fixation". If i hand you a URL that already has a session ID, and you click it and log in to the site, you've logged in my session for me and i can now visit the site as you. One way around that is to switch to a new session when someone logs in...but if your app is a shopping cart, it can be annoying making people log in to buy something.
Second biggest: If a user follows a link that doesn't have a session ID, PHP won't recognize them. (The user can use the "Back" button to get back to a point where they have a session ID, but that sucks usabilitywise.) You have to ensure that the session ID appears in every link or URL. Fortunately, PHP will rewrite most of them for you, but any links you generate with JS and such, you'll have to do yourself.
I'm currently building a shopping cart for an eCommerce site and am wondering about the best way to persist user data in the session during the checkout process.
The user flow works is as follows:
shopping cart -> login/register -> select delivery address -> confirm -> pay
My issue is once a user is logged in, I want to display a list of their delivery addresses so they can select one. The easiest way to do this is querying the model by the user's id, but my concern is for security - my first thought was to store the user id in the session and then use this to retrieve the addresses. However there's nothing to stop another user potentially hijacking this id (just by guessing random numbers) and revealing addresses for other users. I could perhaps use their email address, but this too could potentially be guessed. Is my best bet to use a combination of the two, or is there a better way?
PHP has built-in session capability. It loads a unique cookie to the browser and allows you to keep all session data on the server-side via the $_SESSION array. The cookie ID is unique for the session, not the user, so it changes each time the user signs in (if the cookie has expired). If you conduct the session in https, it's very secure. Without https, the session is vulnerable to someone with the (special) knowledge and inclination to intercept the cookie data, though such an interception is not easy. Depending on how secure you want to be, running without https may or may not be acceptable for you.
You can read more about PHP session capability here:
http://php.net/manual/en/features.sessions.php
I do a lot of php and javascript, but I think this is relatively language-agnostic question. Are there any best-practices for when to use each of:
URL variables
SESSION variables
cookies
I understand the inherent limitations of what some of them can't do, but it seems like their use can overlap sometimes, too, and those instances are what I'm really asking about.
EDIT
Just to clarify: I'm pretty familiar with the technicalities of which method is stored where, and which the client/server can access. What I am looking for is something a little higher-level, like "temporary user settings should live in cookies, data state info should live on the server, etc..."
Thanks!
In general:
Use URL (GET) parameters for sending simple request parameters to the server, eg. a search query or the page number in a product listing.
Use session variables, as the name indicates, to store temporary data associated with a specific user session, eg. a logged-in user's ID or a non-persistent shopping cart.
Avoid using cookies when possible. Use them sparingly to store settings that are tied to a particular computer / user profile, eg. a setting such as "remember my user ID on this computer".
Sessions are stored on the server, which means clients do not have access to the information you store about them. Session data, being stored on your server, does not need to be transmitted in full with each page; clients just need to send an ID and the data is loaded from the server.
On the other hand, Cookies are stored on the client. They can be made durable for a long time and would allow you to work more smoothly when you have a cluster of web servers. However unlike Sessions, data stored in Cookies is transmitted in full with each page request. You should use cookie if you need longer logged-in sessions.
URL variables (GET) are open and can be seen by user. They are also useful as it allows the user to bookmark the page and share the link.
PHP embeds the session id directly into URLs when cookies are disabled. Then, the session id becomes a value accessible thru an HTTP GET variable.
we are solving the problem with eshop (php, mysql). The client want to have the same eshop on two domains with shared shopping cart. In the shop customer can do the shopping without users account (can't be logged in). And there is the problem, how to make the shared shopping cart cross domain.
The data from cart is stored in sessions, which we stored in database too. But we can't solve the problem in carrying data over domains. Identifying unlogged user is not holeproof (research).
The example, how it should work
Customer goes to domainOne and add some things to the cart. Than he goes to domainTwo (by link, typing domain address, however) and add some other things to the cart. In the cart he has things from both domains (after refreshing page).
Do you have any idea, how to solve this problem?
What didn't work:
redirecting is not possible due to customer requirments
cookies are related to domain
set_cookie with the other domain didn't work
the simpliest way is to carry over only the sessionid (stored in cookies) but we don't know, how to wholeproof identify unlogged users.
is there any other place, where data can be stored on client side except cookies? (probably not)
we can't use sending sessionid by params in url (if user click to link to the other domain) or resolving the header referer, bcs we don't know, how user can achieve the other domain.
If you can't understand me, take me a question. If you think, that having eshop on two domains with shared (common) cart is bad idea, don't tell me, we know it.
Thanks for each answer.
You can use a third domain to identify your customers over all domains.
Use for example a PHP File on http://thirdDomain.com/session.php that is included on all pages on both shops.
Sample:
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://thirdDomain.com/session.php"></script>
After your customer switches domains, you can identify him as the same customer using the third domain.
You can assign the session id on both shops to the session id on the third domain to access the cart on both shops. You only need to inform the third domain about your shop sessions (i.e. add them as parameter).
Depending on how flexible you are with your code and templates, you can even use an output from the third domain to define the session id in your shops. This way you can use the same session id on all domains.
But normally a session id assignment should be the more secure way.
Using the javascript version you can also output scripts that may add a session id to all outgoing links and forms to the other domain in the current html page. This might be interesting if you can identify your customer as having cookies blocked.
You can also use the javascript to inform the parent document about an existing session.
This keeps getting asked.
Have a search for SSO.
You need to pass the session id in the URL (or vai a POST) across the domains, then:
1) check the session does not already exist on the target domain
2) rebind the session using the session id sent
e.g.
if ((!$_COOKIE[session_name()]) && $_GET['passed_id']) {
if (check_session_exists($_GET['passed_id'])) {
session_id($_GET['passed_id']);
}
}
session_start();
...
function check_session_exists($id)
{
$path=session_save_path() . $id;
if (file_exists($path) && (time()-filemtime($path)<session_cache_expire())) {
return true;
}
return false;
}
This also means you need to add '?passed_id=' . urlencode(session_id()) to any URL pointing to the other domain.
C.
The schema is quite simple and widely used. By google for it's numerous services for example. You have a whole picture by tracking down HTTP interchange between your browser and various google services to get the idea.
Suppose we have our client authorized for the 1st domain. By getting to the second, we have to:
start a session and store some token in it.
ask browser to request 1st domain somehow and send this token along.
1st domain will recognize our client and make a connection in the shared database between this token and user id.
By requesting second domain again, we will have it authorized for it's already started session.
The only question remains is how to request 1st domain. It can be a picture, or JS request or entire page redirect. Certain choice is up to you.
You can use Flash LSO's for this matter i think. Normally LSO's are stored in their domain specific sandboxes, but if two domain objects allow, they can communicate as stated in the "cross-movie communication" section in http://download.macromedia.com/pub/flash/whitepapers/security.pdf.
For general info about LSO's:
http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/articles/lso/
SSO.
CartA has iframe that 1) checks if the user is "active" (has session) 2) creates anon session
CartB has iframe that do 1) or 2)
iframe loads from SSO domain (any domain you can have)
SSO solution: build yours or use others - like simplesamlphp or something...
And there should be no need to pass sessions/params with URIs...
You can store data in other places than cookies (e.g. Flash cookies, localStorage) but all use same origin policy, which is the standard security model of the web: data stored by a domain can only be accessed by that domain and its subdomains. The standard workaround is to embed an iframe from the foreign domain into the page. That iframe will have access to the cookies of the foreign domain, and its url will be controlled by the local domain, which allows for communication.
A simple solution based on that is to have a table of (domainA sessionid, domainB sessionid) pairs. When a new user arrives to domainA, (new sessionid, NULL) is added to the table; the page shown to him includes an invisible iframe with source = http://domainB/mergeSessions.php?sessionA=1234. mergeSessions.php will then receive sessionA as an URL parameter and sessionB as a cookie, and update the session link table accordingly.
You could attempt to identify your visitors by IP, browser type, browser version, OS, screen resolution, and whatever else you come up with. That you store in the shared database when someone accesses either site.
If, within a small time window, say < 5 min, requests from that IP with those parameters comes, you can reasonably assume that it's the same user. Again, make sure you use everything you can find find to identify that user and by no means base anything secure on this or you will be subject to hijacking.
What about something like this, not sure how good it would be though.
User goes to store1. If user does not have a session cookie, redirect to a special page on store2 asking for the session id and sending the url on store1 to return to. The special page looks at the session cookie and redirects back to the original url on store1 with the session id (like the answer by #symcbean). Then on store1, the session cookie gets set(or created new) and no more redirecting happens. And then the same but oposite if the user is on store2 with no session cookie.
But if the user does not have cookies enabled, I can see an infinite loop happening. Not sure if it would be possible to detect and stop somehow.
But this way would be hacky at best.
1) Obviously, use the same session-store for both domains (files, database, memcached, the usual suspects.
2) If after session_start() the $_SESSION is empty, create an 'all domains' array in the session (do this on every domain, regardless which one it is, ).
$_SESSION['all_domains'] = array(
'domain1.com' => true, //<= current domain the customer is on,
'domain2.com' => false, //other domain, no cookie for it yet.
'domain2.com' => false); //repeat for all domains needed
3) Create a session-setter script on all domains (let's call it 'sesset.php':
<?php
if(isset($_GET['sessid']){
session_id($_GET['sessid']);
session_start();
//also, check here for the domains:
if(!isset($_SESSION['all_domains'])){
//set the array as before, flag this domain as true.
} else {
$_SESSION['all_domains'][$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']] = true;
//you might want to set a custom domainname instead of HTTP_HOST, so you won't get doubles from domain with & without www. and so on.
}
}
?>
4) On every conceivable php HTML page, put this somewhere near the end of the body:
<?php
foreach($_SESSION['all_domains'] as $domain => $domainset){
if(!$domainset){
echo '<img src="http://'.$domain.'/sesset.php?sessid='.session_id().' width="1" height="1"/>';
}
}
?>
Not fullproof, but will get almost all users. Ofcourse, one could do it with a redirect cascade instead of 'hidden images', but searchbots (google et al.) very much get confused about it, especially if they don't remember the cookie and are stuck being redirected again & again.
easyXDM is a framework that allows the user to easily work around the Same Origin Policy.
Its built-in RPC feature is very easy to use, and you should be up in running in no-time.
For your case, select one of the domains to be the 'checkout'-domain (A) - this is the domain that will keep the session stored. On the same domain you create a small file with an easyXDM endpoint that is responsible for storing/retrieving the data sent from the other domain (B).
Now, in domain B, you include easyXDM and when storing/retrieving data from the cart, you access the RPC methods instead.
Option 1 Use Iframes:
Site 1 has an Iframe of site 2
Site 2 has an Iframe of site 1
When a user selects an item from site one, set the iframe value to a dynamic string ie domain2.com/iframe.php?itemid=someitem.
Have domain2 grab the $_GET information with PHP from the iframe and update the user's cookie.
Do the same in the other direction.
Option 2: Javascript includes
You can do something similar with cross-site included JS files generated by PHP to "pull" the contents of the user's cookie to the other site.
Option 3: Curl
Just post the data from one domain to the other, so both have a copy. This is the least secure method since there is no guarantee that the IP address or other identifying data can't be duplicated. Though, you can have some "question" or pass phrase to ensure it is the same person. Possibly by setting an email address?
Option 4: Third-party cookies
I think this one was already mentioned, but you can set the cookies from a third domain, so both sites functionally exactly the same rather than "toggling" back and forth between the two.