Mobile Session Management - Which Session?

Session management vulnerabilities are tricky. They are highly dependent on context. Identifying session fixation, session replay and the like means looking at the end to end session lifecycle from creation to use to termination.

On normal webapps this is mostly a straightforward affair including - examine the session cookie, ensure proper cookie hygiene, make sure transport is protected, and that timeouts are set correctly. On normal webapps the server sets the timeout for the session cookie (say 20 minutes), sends to the browser and the server validates the session on the return trip. The session lives as a relationship between the browser client and the web server. But what about mobile sessions? They are pretty different, let's count the ways.

First off the user likely authenticates locally to the mobile app itself, let's call this session #1. Then any time the app needs to do something on the network (like synchronize data or replicate) it authenticates from the mobile app to the server, let's call this session #2. Next the server is very likely an API Gateway with no data or business logic, that is on the backend app servers, so the Mobile API Gateway has authenticate to the backend servers, let's call this session #3.

Now just logging into each of these sessions is a decent bit of work in and of itself. Add onto that the fact that very likely these are three fundamentally different protocols - maybe username/password for #1, OAuth for #2 and SAML for #3. Logging in is where it begins, but that's not where it ends.
How do you ensure consistent policy across these different protocols? When do you timeout the session? What happens if session #1 times out but sessions #2 & 3 are still alive? How do you reinstantiate? What happens when your user logs out?

Today these are mainly exercises left to the implementers to figure out, the tools market is pretty nascent. The above scenario is a pretty simple view compared to some Mobile apps. Enterprises still struggle with sessions management for webapps, ensuring session data isn't easily spoofed or stolen requires careful review, but its vastly more complicated for many mobile apps. Until ready made tools are available, enterprise's time spent on end to end design and testing that the sessions mesh appropriately is time well spent.

Update: Paul Madsen added on in Twitter "and the original SAML session from enterprise IdP"  For sure there are many combinations and permutations to consider. What I am seeing though is that a base case Mobile app has at least 3x more compelxity for session management than a base case web app. Considering may webapps still struggle this is food for thought.

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