AuthClient Update - Idle Timeouts

The Dfinity security team has flagged the 24 hour default delegation in @dfinity/auth-client as too insecure of a default, so we will be releasing an update as an 0.11.x minor version update.

The new version will have some changes to @dfinity/agent as well as the auth-client:

  • Set the default delegation timeout to 8 hours
  • Add support for invalidating an identity to an Actor and HttpAgent
  • Add an idle tracker to the auth-client that will invalidate
  • Provide onIdle and onIdleWarning callbacks to the authClient to trigger warning dialogs and prompts to refresh the user’s authentication
  • Default idle time will be 10 minutes
    • After Idle, the user’s identity will be invalidated, and the delegation will be cleared from localStorage
  • Delegation timeout, idle time, and idle warning will all be configurable

These features are designed to make IC dapps secure by default, and hopefully with enough configuration to suit a variety of use cases, while minimizing the impact to user experience that is provided by our default.

What do you think? Do you support these changes, and are the defaults sensible for your use cases?

7 Likes

Nice, I love this one:

Provide onIdle and onIdleWarning callbacks to the authClient to trigger warning dialogs and prompts to refresh the user’s authentication

Question, that default idle time is the one you can set in maxTimeToLive ?

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The current maxTimeToLive option represents the expiration of the delegation, which becomes invalid after that # of nanoseconds. In the new scheme, it will represent the amount of time before a DelegationIdentity becomes invalid, assuming you have either prevented your browser from going idle in that time, or if the application has set the idle time to equal the maxTimeToLive, because they are not interested in that behavior

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Sounds good. I would also like to check if delegation has expired and not rely on catching errors when calling actor functions. Is that included in the list? Maybe both - timeout and idle are triggering the onIdle callback?

We have a utility for that! @dfinity/authentication/isDelegationValid

4 Likes

Nice, however the only place I have seen it used is here agent-js/index.ts at 96c5fee3f8e8246960f6cd4031ca52eb4dc6bd85 · dfinity/agent-js · GitHub

I thought there will be something like agent.isExpired(), because it seems that currently, we have to take a delegation from localStorage to use this function. If I hardcode the key “ic-delegation” things may break in the future.

I see what you mean - I’ll make a note to add the ability to inspect the identity being used by an actor, as well as checking its expiration, during the invalidation refactor

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Is “idle time” the time when there are no requests to IC with user delegation?
What does “refresh the user’s authentication” mean?

Idle time is when there is no cursor movement, scrolling, or keyboard events for a certain amount of time.

Refreshing the authentication would require sending the user back to II to log in again, but it would allow you to replace the Identity inside of the HttpAgent without having to re-initialize the Actor

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Getting close to the final shape of this API - here’s a glimpse into what it will look like

const authClient = await AuthClient.create({
  idleOptions: {
    idleTimeout: 1000 * 60 * 30, // default is 30 minutes
    onIdle: () => {
      // invalidate identity in your actor
      Actor.agentOf(actor).invalidateIdentity() 
      // prompt user to refresh their authentication
      refreshLogin();
    },
    disableIdle: false, // set to true to disable idle timeout
  }
});
// ...authClient.login()
const identity = await authClient.getIdentity();
const actor = Actor.createActor(idlFactory, {
  agent: new HttpAgent({
    identity,
  }),
  canisterId,
});

refreshLogin() {
  // prompt the user before refreshing their authentication
  authClient.login({
    onSuccess: async () => {
      // authClient now has an identity
      const identity = await authClient.getIdentity();
      // set new identity in your actor without reloading the page
      Actor.agentOf(actor).replaceIdentity(identity);
    },
  });
}
2 Likes

Nice :+1:

  • will onIdle callback accept promises too?

  • if the identity becomes idle and Actor.agentOf(actor).invalidateIdentity() would not be called - i.e. if a developer does not implement such call, what would or would not happen?

Okay, I have a better pattern now. The authClient can let you register Actors. Registered actors will automatically get their identity invalidated after idle, and can get refreshed after login success.

You can add additional callbacks with authClient.idleManager?.registerCallback?.(cb)

const authClient = await AuthClient.create({
  idleOptions: {
    idleTimeout: 1000 * 60 * 30, // default is 30 minutes
    disableIdle: false, // set to true to disable idle timeout
  }
});
// ...authClient.login()
const identity = await authClient.getIdentity();
const actor = Actor.createActor(idlFactory, {
  agent: new HttpAgent({
    identity,
  }),
  canisterId,
});

authClient.registerActor("ii", actor);

refreshLogin() {
  // prompt the user then refresh their authentication
  authClient.login();
}

authClient.idleManager?.registerCallback?.(refreshLogin)
3 Likes

@kpeacock

Could we do away with the onSuccess callback inside the authclient.login and just resolve the promise with the relevant response (Identity?) instead of having to specify a callback.
This is because the login is itself a Promise and it seems like a poorly designed API if we need to specify a callback inside it when everything’s resolved.

Thoughts?

The login being a promise is mainly to support async / await patterns inside of the onSuccess callback. A callback approach is appropriate here because it mirrors the actual browser API being used. Because we have to handle interruptions from the opened window, and we are relying on the message event listener, which are asynchronous and event-based.

I get that trying to await the result of the operation is syntactically nice, but it can also lock up the user’s interaction in the page that initiated the request, which is not ideal. You are free to do this by wrapping the login and having the onSuccess resolve that Promise, but it is not an ideal practice that I would encourage

3 Likes