Manage sessions

Manage sessions to allow your users to securely access your application, without needing to reauthenticate for every request. This provides a better identity experience with no cost to security (see Session management).

info

This article explains how to manage sessions created using these authentication flows. For backend-to-backend integrations, see Manage sessions for backend authentication.

Common use cases that rely on the session management:

Silent authentication within the context of the same app or across apps (SSO)
Multi-factor authentication

There are many ways to implement sessions, which may depend on factors like whether the app is highly secure. This describes only one example of a session lifecycle, which includes the basic tasks you'll need to do as part of any session management flow you create. See Session cookie for security recommendations for creating a session cookie.

Create sessions

When a user requests to login, create a new session by authenticating the user using our Authentication APIs. Regardless of authentication method, Transmit returns an access token and refresh token (if offline_access was requested). For example:

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{
  "access_token": "[ACCESS_TOKEN]",
  "id_token": "[ID_TOKEN]",
  "refresh_token": "[REFRESH_TOKEN]",
  "expires_in": 3600
}

Validate tokens

The access token is a JWT (Json Web Token) signed by Transmit (see Token reference for the claim structure). We strongly recommend validating it using these guidelines before you can use it to grant the user access.

Security

It is highly discouraged to use a token without validating it as it may lead to authorizing malicious tokens.

Here's an example of a decoded token:

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{
  "tid": "",
  "app_name": "Acme",
  "app_id": "8flFllgrd1Wqiru4IGai0",
  "roles": [
    "smP3MD65l7hKXG6qJ-S5d"
  ],
  "jti": "IJMTqbmijVG7_LsJz-y5U",
  "sub": "bb8dc75.8AEM5PpWyJBH6opzIOrJ2.transmit",
  "iat": 1658056533,
  "exp": 1658060133,
  "scope": "offline_access",
  "client_id": "bb8dc75.8AEM5PpWyJBH6opzIOrJ2.transmit",
  "iss": "https://userid.security",
  "aud": "userid-api"
}

Store session

Once the access token is validated, you'll need to store it so that it can be used to grant access in subsequent requests.

Security

We recommend binding the session to your app's local session. For example, save a reference from the local session ID to the access token in your backend. And then when receiving the session cookie from the frontend, “link” it to Transmit access token and IDP session.

Extend access

When a user returns to your website, you'll want to try to provide them access without requiring them to login. Implement the following session management logic that determines the user's eligibility to login without authentication.

Start by checking for a session cookie, which indicates a local session already exists. If not found, redirect the user to login. If found, send the cookie to your backend and use it to retrieve the tokens.

If the access token is valid, you can allow the user to continue to your website without having to login again.
If the access token has expired, delete your session cookie and prompt the user to login. Alternatively, try authenticating a user silently based on an existing IDP session.

Note

Refresh tokens shouldn't be used to extend access and renew sessions. Refresh tokens are reserved for offline access scenarios.

Logout session

When the user requests to logout from your app, the session cookie should be deleted and the user should be taken back to the login page (or a page that doesn't require authentication). Since the stored session is bound to the cookie, it should no longer be accessible. However, as a precaution, it's recommended to also logout of the IDP session. This will terminate all user's sessions for this application.

To logout the user from the session, use the logout API:

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curl -i -X POST \
  'https://api.transmitsecurity.io/cis/v1/auth/logout' \
  -H 'Authorization: Bearer [TOKEN]' # User's access token