Wednesday, September 4, 2013

Flexible Manipulation of Session Timeout for Web Applications of Oracle Identity Manager

Session Timeout configuration and its importance

Session timeout as the name describes, is the time period after which the session object of a web application expires. The timeout period can be a fixed period (Hard Timeout) or, an inactivity period (soft timeout) when user does not refresh or request a page. Once the session has reached the timeout, user is required to re-authenticate to access the web application. Hard Session timeout is a defined timeout period of the session ID irrespective of user activity. If the application has a hard session timeout of say 9 hrs, the user will be asked to re-authenticate after 9 hrs even if the session was used actively.
Hard and Soft session timeout configuration is a security control measure. They protect the user session from security attacks like CSRF, session fixation etc.

There are few ways to configure hard and soft session timeout for applications. We will discuss mainly the soft session timeout configuration for Oracle Identity Manager (OIM) version 11gR2PS1.

If an application is protected by an Access Management solution, then the application session timeout must be configured through the Access Management tier.

For a standalone application (not using Single Sign On), the (inactivity) session timeout configuration can be done through the application deployment descriptor files (web.xml, weblogic.xml (in case application is deployed in Weblogic Application Server)) or it can be configured using weblogic deployment plan.

In this post we will discuss the session timeout configuration for OIM Web Applications using weblogic deployment plan.


The complete article is available on OTN(Oracle Technology Network)

6 comments:

  1. Good information on the Oracle Identity Manager and the other uses of it. The session configuration differs highly from the other software of other companies.

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  2. Santhoshi, I am glad that you liked the article and that it was informative and useful to you and thanks to all other readers as well for their feedback provided offline.

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  3. FYI Everyone, the session timeout steps work for OIM 11gR2 PS2 release as well.

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  4. Hi Firdaus,

    The time I configured this, I see sessions not being shared by sysadmin sub-pages. For e.g: If I click on Manage IT Resource, it gives out error 401. If I click on Reconciliation, I need to login again.

    Is there a way to reset this change or restore to default?

    Copying Admin config back to oimserver config (policyA & policyB) dint help.

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