Provided by: libapache2-authcookie-perl_3.31-2_all 
NAME
Apache2_4::AuthCookie - Perl Authentication and Authorization via cookies for Apache 2.4
VERSION
version 3.31
SYNOPSIS
Make sure your mod_perl is at least 2.0.9, with StackedHandlers, MethodHandlers, Authen, and Authz
compiled in.
# In httpd.conf or .htaccess:
PerlModule Sample::Apache2::AuthCookieHandler
PerlSetVar WhatEverPath /
PerlSetVar WhatEverLoginScript /login.pl
# The following line is optional - it allows you to set the domain
# scope of your cookie. Default is the current domain.
PerlSetVar WhatEverDomain .yourdomain.com
# Use this to only send over a secure connection
PerlSetVar WhatEverSecure 1
# Use this if you want user session cookies to expire if the user
# doesn't request a auth-required or recognize_user page for some
# time period. If set, a new cookie (with updated expire time)
# is set on every request.
PerlSetVar WhatEverSessionTimeout +30m
# to enable the HttpOnly cookie property, use HttpOnly.
# This is an MS extension. See:
# http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/author/dhtml/httponly_cookies.asp
PerlSetVar WhatEverHttpOnly 1
# to enable the SameSite cookie property, set SameSite to "lax" or "strict".
# See: https://www.owasp.org/index.php/SameSite
PerlSetVar WhatEverSameSite strict
# Usually documents are uncached - turn off here
PerlSetVar WhatEverCache 1
# Use this to make your cookies persistent (+2 hours here)
PerlSetVar WhatEverExpires +2h
# Use to make AuthCookie send a P3P header with the cookie
# see http://www.w3.org/P3P/ for details about what the value
# of this should be
PerlSetVar WhatEverP3P "CP=\"...\""
# optional: enable decoding of intercepted GET/POST params:
PerlSetVar WhatEverEncoding UTF-8
# optional: enable decoding of httpd.conf "Requires" directives
PerlSetVar WhatEverRequiresEncoding UTF-8
# These documents require user to be logged in.
<Location /protected>
AuthType Sample::Apache2::AuthCookieHandler
AuthName WhatEver
PerlAuthenHandler Sample::Apache2::AuthCookieHandler->authenticate
Require valid-user
</Location>
# How to handle a custom requirement (non-user).
PerlAddAuthzProvider species Sample::Apache2::AuthCookieHandler->authz_species
<Location /protected/species>
Require species klingon
</Location>
# These documents don't require logging in, but allow it.
<FilesMatch "\.ok$">
AuthType Sample::Apache2::AuthCookieHandler
AuthName WhatEver
PerlFixupHandler Sample::Apache2::AuthCookieHandler->recognize_user
</FilesMatch>
# This is the action of the login.pl script above.
<Files LOGIN>
AuthType Sample::Apache2::AuthCookieHandler
AuthName WhatEver
SetHandler perl-script
PerlResponseHandler Sample::Apache2::AuthCookieHandler->login
</Files>
DESCRIPTION
This module is for "mod_perl" version 2 for "Apache" version 2.4.x. If you are running mod_perl version
1, you need Apache::AuthCookie instead. If you are running "Apache" 2.0.0-2.2.x, you need
Apache2::AuthCookie instead.
Apache2_4::AuthCookie allows you to intercept a user's first unauthenticated access to a protected
document. The user will be presented with a custom form where they can enter authentication credentials.
The credentials are posted to the server where AuthCookie verifies them and returns a session key.
The session key is returned to the user's browser as a cookie. As a cookie, the browser will pass the
session key on every subsequent accesses. AuthCookie will verify the session key and re-authenticate the
user.
All you have to do is write a custom module that inherits from AuthCookie. Your module is a class which
implements two methods:
authen_cred()
Verify the user-supplied credentials and return a session key. The session key can be any string -
often you'll use some string containing username, timeout info, and any other information you need to
determine access to documents, and append a one-way hash of those values together with some secret
key.
authen_ses_key()
Verify the session key (previously generated by authen_cred(), possibly during a previous request)
and return the user ID. This user ID will be fed to "$r->user()" to set Apache's idea of who's
logged in.
By using AuthCookie versus Apache's built-in AuthBasic you can design your own authentication system.
There are several benefits.
1. The client doesn't *have* to pass the user credentials on every subsequent access. If you're using
passwords, this means that the password can be sent on the first request only, and subsequent
requests don't need to send this (potentially sensitive) information. This is known as "ticket-
based" authentication.
2. When you determine that the client should stop using the credentials/session key, the server can tell
the client to delete the cookie. Letting users "log out" is a notoriously impossible-to-solve
problem of AuthBasic.
3. AuthBasic dialog boxes are ugly. You can design your own HTML login forms when you use AuthCookie.
4. You can specify the domain of a cookie using "PerlSetVar" commands. For instance, if your AuthName
is "WhatEver", you can put the command
PerlSetVar WhatEverDomain .yourhost.com
into your server setup file and your access cookies will span all hosts ending in ".yourhost.com".
5. You can optionally specify the name of your cookie using the "CookieName" directive. For instance,
if your AuthName is "WhatEver", you can put the command
PerlSetVar WhatEverCookieName MyCustomName
into your server setup file and your cookies for this AuthCookie realm will be named MyCustomName.
Default is AuthType_AuthName.
This is the flow of the authentication handler, less the details of the redirects. Two
HTTP_MOVED_TEMPORARILY's are used to keep the client from displaying the user's credentials in the
Location field. They don't really change AuthCookie's model, but they do add another round-trip request
to the client.
(-----------------------) +---------------------------------+
( Request a protected ) | AuthCookie sets custom error |
( page, but user hasn't )---->| document and returns |
( authenticated (no ) | HTTP_FORBIDDEN. Apache abandons |
( session key cookie) ) | current request and creates sub |
(-----------------------) | request for the error document. |<-+
| Error document is a script that | |
| generates a form where the user | |
return | enters authentication | |
^------------------->| credentials (login & password). | |
/ \ False +---------------------------------+ |
/ \ | |
/ \ | |
/ \ V |
/ \ +---------------------------------+ |
/ Pass \ | User's client submits this form | |
/ user's \ | to the LOGIN URL, which calls | |
| credentials |<------------| AuthCookie->login(). | |
\ to / +---------------------------------+ |
\authen_cred/ |
\ function/ |
\ / |
\ / |
\ / +------------------------------------+ |
\ / return | Authen cred returns a session | +--+
V------------->| key which is opaque to AuthCookie.*| |
True +------------------------------------+ |
| |
+--------------------+ | +---------------+
| | | | If we had a |
V | V | cookie, add |
+----------------------------+ r | ^ | a Set-Cookie |
| If we didn't have a session| e |T / \ | header to |
| key cookie, add a | t |r / \ | override the |
| Set-Cookie header with this| u |u / \ | invalid cookie|
| session key. Client then | r |e / \ +---------------+
| returns session key with | n | / pass \ ^
| successive requests | | / session \ |
+----------------------------+ | / key to \ return |
| +-| authen_ses_key|------------+
V \ / False
+-----------------------------------+ \ /
| Tell Apache to set Expires header,| \ /
| set user to user ID returned by | \ /
| authen_ses_key, set authentication| \ /
| to our type (e.g. AuthCookie). | \ /
+-----------------------------------+ \ /
V
(---------------------) ^
( Request a protected ) |
( page, user has a )--------------+
( session key cookie )
(---------------------)
* The session key that the client gets can be anything you want. For
example, encrypted information about the user, a hash of the
username and password (similar in function to Digest
authentication), or the user name and password in plain text
(similar in function to HTTP Basic authentication).
The only requirement is that the authen_ses_key function that you
create must be able to determine if this session_key is valid and
map it back to the originally authenticated user ID.
METHODS
authen_cred()
You must define this method yourself in your subclass of "Apache2_4::AuthCookie". Its job is to create
the session key that will be preserved in the user's cookie. The arguments passed to it are:
sub authen_cred ($$\@) {
my $self = shift; # Package name (same as AuthName directive)
my $r = shift; # Apache request object
my @cred = @_; # Credentials from login form
...blah blah blah, create a session key...
return $session_key;
}
The only limitation on the session key is that you should be able to look at it later and determine the
user's username. You are responsible for implementing your own session key format. A typical format is
to make a string that contains the username, an expiration time, whatever else you need, and an MD5 hash
of all that data together with a secret key. The hash will ensure that the user doesn't tamper with the
session key.
authen_ses_key()
You must define this method yourself in your subclass of "Apache2_4::AuthCookie". Its job is to look at
a session key and determine whether it is valid. If so, it returns the username of the authenticated
user.
sub authen_ses_key ($$$) {
my ($self, $r, $session_key) = @_;
...blah blah blah, check whether $session_key is valid...
return $ok ? $username : undef;
}
Optionally, return an array of 2 or more items that will be passed to method custom_errors. It is the
responsibility of this method to return the correct response to the main Apache module.
custom_errors($r,@_)
This method handles the server response when you wish to access the Apache custom_response method. Any
suitable response can be used. this is particularly useful when implementing 'by directory' access
control using the user authentication information. i.e.
/restricted
/one user is allowed access here
/two not here
/three AND here
The authen_ses_key method would return a normal response when the user attempts to access 'one' or
'three' but return (NOT_FOUND, 'File not found') if an attempt was made to access subdirectory 'two'. Or,
in the case of expired credentials, (AUTH_REQUIRED,'Your session has timed out, you must login again').
example 'custom_errors'
sub custom_errors {
my ($self,$r,$CODE,$msg) = @_;
# return custom message else use the server's standard message
$r->custom_response($CODE, $msg) if $msg;
return($CODE);
}
where CODE is a valid code from Apache2::Const
EXAMPLE
For an example of how to use "Apache2_4::AuthCookie", you may want to check out the test suite, which
runs AuthCookie through a few of its paces. The documents are located in t/eg/, and you may want to
peruse t/real.t to see the generated httpd.conf file (at the bottom of real.t) and check out what
requests it's making of the server (at the top of real.t).
ENCODING AND CHARACTER SETS
Encoding
AuthCookie provides support for decoding POST/GET data if you tell it what the client encoding is. You
do this by setting the "${auth_name}Encoding" setting in "httpd.conf". E.g.:
PerlSetVar WhateEverEncoding UTF-8
# and you also need to arrange for charset=UTF-8 at the end of the
# Content-Type header with something like:
AddDefaultCharset UTF-8
Note that you can use charsets other than "UTF-8", however, you need to arrange for the browser to send
the right encoding back to the server.
If you have turned on Encoding support by setting "${auth_name}Encoding", this has the following effects:
• The internal pure-perl params processing subclass will be used, even if libapreq2 is installed.
libapreq2 does not have any support for encoding or unicode.
• POST/GET data intercepted by AuthCookie will be decoded to perl's internal format using "decode" in
Encode.
• The value stored in "$r->user" will be encoded as bytes, not characters using the configured encoding
name. This is because the value stored by mod_perl is a C API string, and not a perl string. You
can use decoded_user() to get user string encoded using character semantics.
This does has some caveats:
• your authen_cred() and authen_ses_key() function is expected to return a decoded username, either by
passing it through "decode()" in Encode, or, by turning on the UTF8 flag if appropriate.
• Due to the way HTTP works, cookies cannot contain non-ASCII characters. Because of this, if you are
including the username in your generated session key, you will need to escape any non-ascii
characters in the session key returned by authen_cred().
• Similarly, you must reverse this escaping process in authen_ses_key() and return a "decode()" in
Encode decoded username. If your authen_cred() function already only generates ASCII-only session
keys then you do not need to worry about any of this.
• The value stored in "$r->user" will be encoded using bytes semantics using the configured Encoding.
If you want the decoded user value, use decoded_user() instead.
Requires
You can also specify what the charset is of the Apache "$r->requires" data is by setting
"${auth_name}RequiresEncoding" in httpd.conf.
E.g.:
PerlSetVar WhatEverRequiresEncoding UTF-8
This will make it so that AuthCookie will decode your "requires" directives using the configured
character set. You really only need to do this if you have used non-ascii characters in any of your
"requires" directives in httpd.conf. e.g.:
requires user programmør
THE LOGIN SCRIPT
You will need to create a login script (called login.pl above) that generates an HTML form for the user
to fill out. You might generate the page using a ModPerl::Registry script, a HTML::Mason component, an
Apache handler, or perhaps even using a static HTML page. It's usually useful to generate it dynamically
so that you can define the 'destination' field correctly (see below).
The following fields must be present in the form:
1. The ACTION of the form must be /LOGIN (or whatever you defined in your server configuration as
handled by the "->login()" method - see example in the SYNOPSIS section).
2. The various user input fields (username, passwords, etc.) must be named 'credential_0',
'credential_1', etc. on the form. These will get passed to your authen_cred() method.
3. You must define a form field called 'destination' that tells AuthCookie where to redirect the request
after successfully logging in. Typically this value is obtained from "$r->prev->uri". See the
login.pl script in t/eg/.
In addition, you might want your login page to be able to tell why the user is being asked to log in. In
other words, if the user sent bad credentials, then it might be useful to display an error message saying
that the given username or password are invalid. Also, it might be useful to determine the difference
between a user that sent an invalid auth cookie, and a user that sent no auth cookie at all. To cope
with these situations, AuthCookie will set "$r->subprocess_env('AuthCookieReason')" to one of the
following values.
no_cookie
The user presented no cookie at all. Typically this means the user is trying to log in for the first
time.
bad_cookie
The cookie the user presented is invalid. Typically this means that the user is not allowed access
to the given page.
bad_credentials
The user tried to log in, but the credentials that were passed are invalid.
You can examine this value in your login form by examining "$r->prev->subprocess_env('AuthCookieReason')"
(because it's a sub-request).
Of course, if you want to give more specific information about why access failed when a cookie is
present, your authen_ses_key() method can set arbitrary entries in "$r->subprocess_env".
THE LOGOUT SCRIPT
If you want to let users log themselves out (something that can't be done using Basic Auth), you need to
create a logout script. For an example, see t/htdocs/docs/logout.pl. Logout scripts may want to take
advantage of AuthCookie's logout() method, which will set the proper cookie headers in order to clear the
user's cookie. This usually looks like "$r->auth_type->logout($r);".
Note that if you don't necessarily trust your users, you can't count on cookie deletion for logging out.
You'll have to expire some server-side login information too. AuthCookie doesn't do this for you, you
have to handle it yourself.
ABOUT SESSION KEYS
Unlike the sample AuthCookieHandler, you have you verify the user's login and password in authen_cred(),
then you do something like:
my $date = localtime;
my $ses_key = Digest::SHA::sha256_hex(join(';', $date, $PID, $PAC));
save $ses_key along with the user's login, and return $ses_key.
Now authen_ses_key() looks up the $ses_key passed to it and returns the saved login. I use a database to
store the session key and retrieve it later.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
• I upgraded to Apache 2.4 and now AuthCookie doesn't work!
Apache 2.4 radically changed the authenciation and authorization API. You will need to port your
AuthCookie subclass over to the Apache 2.4 API. See the POD documentation in README.apache-2.4 for
more information, but the quick rundown is you need to:
• Inherit from "Apache2_4::AuthCookie"
• Remove all "PerlAuthzHandler" configuration entries.
• Write Authz Provider methods for any "Requires" directives that you are using that apache does
not provide for already (e.g. apache already handles "user" and "valid-user") and register them
with something like.
PerlAddAuthzProvier species Sample::AuthCookieHandler->authz_species
• Replace instances of "${AuthName}Satistfy" with either "RequireAll" or "RequireAny" blocks.
• Why is my authz method called twice per request?
This is normal behaviour under Apache 2.4. This is to accommodate for authorization of anonymous
access. You are expected to return "Apache2::Const::AUTHZ_DENIED_NO_USER" IF "$r->user" has not yet
been set if you want authentication to proceed. Your authz handler will be called a second time
after the user has been authenticated.
• AuthCookie authenticates, but the authorization handler is returning "UNAUTHORIZED" instead of
"FORBIDDEN"!
In Apache 2.4, in "mod_authz_core", if no authz handlers return "AUTHZ_GRANTED", then
"HTTP_UNAUTHORIZED" is returned. In previous versions of Apache, "HTTP_FORBIDDEN" was returned. You
can get the old behaviour if you want it with:
AuthzSendForbiddenOnFailure On
• My log shows an entry like:
authorization result of Require ...: denied (no authenticated user yet)
These are normal. This happens because the authz provider returned "AUTHZ_DENIED_NO_USER" and the
authz provider will be called again after authentication happens.
HISTORY
Originally written by Eric Bartley <bartley@purdue.edu>
versions 2.x were written by Ken Williams <ken@forum.swarthmore.edu>
COPYRIGHT
Copyright (c) 2015 Michael Schout. All rights reserved.
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl
itself.
SEE ALSO
Apache2::AuthCookie::Base
SOURCE
The development version is on github at <https://https://github.com/mschout/apache-authcookie> and may be
cloned from <git://https://github.com/mschout/apache-authcookie.git>
BUGS
Please report any bugs or feature requests on the bugtracker website
<https://github.com/mschout/apache-authcookie/issues>
When submitting a bug or request, please include a test-file or a patch to an existing test-file that
illustrates the bug or desired feature.
AUTHOR
Michael Schout <mschout@cpan.org>
COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE
This software is copyright (c) 2000 by Ken Williams.
This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as the Perl 5
programming language system itself.
perl v5.38.2 2024-03-04 Apache2_4::AuthCookie(3pm)