multi_session

multi_session is a Railtie that extends rails to provide the ability to have multiple sessions per user via encrypted cookies.

Motivation

Rails comes with a session helper method for storing user session information across HTTP requests. The default approach is to store that information in an encrypted cookie that gets passed as a header in each HTTP request/response. That cookie is encrypted/decrypted using the secret_key_base defined in config/secrets.yml (or config/credentials.yml.enc as of Rails version 5.2).

Rails' session is secure and works great but what if you'd like to share that session cookie with multiple Rails applications hosted across different subdomains? Various blogs and stackoverflow questions on the matter suggest sharing the same secret_key_base value amongst the multiple Rails applications. But what if these apps only want to share part of the session information? Or what if there are security concerns because secret_key_base is used for more than just encrypting session cookies? This multi_session railtie provides a helper method (named multi_session) similar to session except that it permits you to create multiple encrypted session cookies per user, each with their own secret key, giving you the flexibility to choose which session components could be shared with other Rails (and non-Rails) web applications.

Usage

multi_session is a helper method that gets added to your ApplicationController and is therefore accessible by all your controllers that subclass ApplicationController, as well all view templates. To create and read new sessions, use bracket notation ([] and []=) like you would with Hash or hash-like objects.

For example:

# app/controllers/some_controller.rb

class SomeController < ApplicationController
  def my_action
    @user = User.find(params.require(:id))
    multi_session[:global_user_session] = {
      'user_id' => @user.id,
      'email'   => @user.email,
      'name'    => @user.full_name
    }
    multi_session[:user_preferences] = {
      'enable_push_notifications' => true,
      'something_else' => false
    }
  end

  def another_action
    @user = User.find(multi_session[:global_user_session]['user_id'])
  end
end

In the example above, multi_session would create 2 encrypted cookies, one named "global_user_session" and the other named "user_preferences". The key_base used to encrypt/decrypt these cookies would need to be defined in config/secrets.yml or config/credentials.yml.enc under a key named :multi_session_keys. Example:

# config/credentials.yml.enc
secret_key_base: # generated by Rails

multi_session_keys: # use `rake secret` to generate custom keys
  global_user_session: # insert a new secret here
  user_preferences: # insert a different secret here

Installation and Requirements

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'multi_session', '~> 1.1'

Currently multi_session will only work with Rails version 5.2.0 or higher. In version 5.2, Rails switched the default session encryption from aes-256-cbc to aes-256-gcm. This gem has only been coded to work with the aes-256-gcm cipher which unfortunately does not work with older versions of ActiveSupport::MessageEncryptor.

Configuration

For the current version multi_session, there these are the configuration values that can optionally be set:

Config option	Type	Description
expires	ActiveSupport::Duration	expiration period for multi_session cookies/values
domain	String/Symbol/Array	domain for the multi_session cookies
authenticated_encrypted_cookie_salt	String	Salt used to derive key for GCM encryption
credentials_strategy	String/Symbol	Strategy for managing credentials.

To configure multi_session, first generate an initializer using the built-in rails generator:

rails g multi_session:install

Then open and edit config/initializers/multi_session.rb:

# config/initializers/multi_session.rb

MultiSession.setup do |config|
  # Uncomment to force multi_session cookies to expire after a period of time
  config.expires = 30.minutes

  # Uncomment to change the domain of the multi_session cookies
  # config.domain = nil

  # Salt used to derive key for GCM encryption. Default value is 'multi session authenticated encrypted cookie'
  config.authenticated_encrypted_cookie_salt = 'my multi session salt value'

  # Specify the strategy by which you are managing credentials in your application
  # Defaults to :credentials or :secrets depending on what your application is using
  # 'credentials' (default) - uses Rails encrypted credentials stored in credentials.yml.enc via Rails.application.credentials
  # 'secrets' - uses Rails secrets specified in secrets.yml via Rails.application.secrets
  # 'creds' - uses the [Creds](https://github.com/freeletics/creds) gem via Rails.configuration.creds
  config.credentials_strategy = 'credentials'
end

Security

multi_session does not introduce any novel security mechanisms. Encryptions/decryption is done using ActiveSupport::MessageEncryptor in the same manner that Rails encrypts the session cookie in Rails 5.2 (see https://github.com/rails/rails/blob/5fb4703471ffb11dab9aa3855daeef9f592f6388/actionpack/lib/action_dispatch/middleware/cookies.rb).

The default cipher for encrypting messages in Rails 5.2 is AES-256-GCM, which is the same as what multi_session uses.

There are many good writeups on the web (such as https://guides.rubyonrails.org/security.html, https://www.justinweiss.com/articles/how-rails-sessions-work/, and https://www.theodinproject.com/courses/ruby-on-rails/lessons/sessions-cookies-and-authentication) that go into detail of how Rails addresses session security concerns and I encourage all app developers to spend some time educating themselves on how Rails sessions work.

The implementation of multi_session is actually quite simple because it leans heavily on existing Rails functionality. The nuts and bolts are primarily coded in lib/multi_session/session.rb (https://github.com/seanhuber/multi_session/blob/b0211d714d995dc01eb817e52f5dc78e52120bf0/lib/multi_session/session.rb). It's a small file, please do your own code-audit before using this gem. 😉

Contributing

Pull requests and issue reports are welcome!

License

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.