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I'm developing a website in PHP and I'm trying to use OpenID for log-in mechanism. I want a behaviour similar to StackOverflow's. By that, I mean whenever I open stackoverflow, I'm already signed in. I found two related questions on StackOverflow:

OpenId + remember me / staying logged in

Sign in with Twitter, and stay signed in (PHP)

I understand that I should sign in the user and if this is his/her first time, I should sign up the user and set a cookie in his/her system. However what I want to know is what should I store in the cookie? Username/password combination? That seems like a security issue. And the other question is where should I check for the cookie? I would appreciate a simple tutorial/code sample. Thank you.

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Alireza Noori
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1 Answers1

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This is basic web app session management with cookies and OpenID doesn't make a difference here at first.

No, absolutely do not store the username and password in the cookie. Cookies act as "bearer tokens", meaning whoever has the cookie gets in. The best thing to store in a cookie is an unguessable and arbitrary key that you can use to look up real information in a table in your application. So, the user shows up with a cookie of "myappsession" and a value of "234871nb341adf" tied to your domain. Your app would then look up the value of "234871nb341adf" in a local data store and see if it's tied to a valid user. You'd be best served to also check how long ago that user was there and whatnot. If it's a valid session and it's within your time and usage limits, the user is logged in automatically.

For extra paranoia from the RP side, you can make use of the checkid_immediate mode of OpenID to make a background call to see if the user is still logged in to their IdP. If they're not, then you at least know which provider to try to send them to for re-validation and can provide a better user experience.

If you want your site to be really secure, you should do all of your sessions over HTTPS and tag your cookies as both "Secure" and "HTTPOnly", which is documented on the setcookie function manual page: http://php.net/manual/en/function.setcookie.php

jricher
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  • Thanks a lot. Since I asked this a long time ago, I came up with a similar solution. I'm glad that I gone that way ;) – Alireza Noori Dec 19 '11 at 17:23
  • @jricher does checkid_immediate require a return_to url? Is there a way to do it "synchronously" instead of waiting for the provider to callback? – Keven Wang Oct 04 '13 at 22:32
  • OpenID works through browser redirects, not direct HTTP calls, so you need to wait for the return. – jricher Nov 18 '13 at 15:44