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Use native EZproxy support to terminate sessions #73

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Jun 30, 2020

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@atc0005 atc0005 commented Jun 30, 2020

MISSING

Light editing has been applied to cover new flags, config file settings, etc., but a larger refresh is still needed to introduce native termination support alongside the existing fail2ban integration.

A few known TODO items:

  • doc.go file
  • CHANGELOG.md
  • README.md
  • docs/*.md doc files

BACKSTORY

Not long after giving a demo on using brick + fail2ban to timeout
existing sessions, I stumbled across another project on GitHub which
uses ezproxy kill to terminate an active user session:

Despite OCLC Support indicating otherwise, native support for
terminating user sessions was clearly available. This built-in support
offers a much safer/localized effect vs banning the IP associated
with a reported account; banning the IP has the potential to have a
much larger splash radius blocking legitimate user accounts.

The primary developer for the calvinm/ezproxy-abuse-checker project
confirmed that they learned of this support on the EZProxy mailing
list: calvinm/ezproxy-abuse-checker#1

This is encouraging, as I am (at least a little) optimistic that this
unpublished support will persist in future versions, at least until
official, fully documented and supported functionality for terminating
sessions is included.

IMPLEMENTATION

This commit adds (optional) support for terminating user sessions
using the official EZProxy binary already present on EZproxy servers.
The fully-qualified location of this binary is configurable via
command-line flag, environment variable or TOML-format configuration
file. Additional settings are provided to tune the sessions search
process such as configurable retries and search delay.

The session termination process involves reading current sessions from
the Active Users and Hosts "state" file that EZproxy uses to track
sessions and hosts managed by EZProxy and then using the EZproxy
binary to terminate each session via the kill subcommand.

As part of the early development efforts I initially tried to use the
latest Audit logs to pull session IDs, but quickly realized that while
the format was easier to parse, it was far less stable due to log
rotation and the need to resolve the active state ourselves (logins
minus logouts, minus timeouts, etc). Some of that support still
remains as of this commit, but may be removed in a future release if
found to not be needed. As of this writing I believe it can still be
used as part of interacting with a future endpoint.

The aforementioned search delay and retry settings are provided to
work around an observed race condition between EZproxy recording state
changes and other applications (such as ours) attempting to read the
current state. The delay in EZproxy writing the changes to disk (or
kernel settings?) may result in our application attempting to
terminate sessions related to a monitoring system report and not
finding them within the Active Users and Hosts "state" file.

The defaults attempt to strike a balance between waiting a little
longer in order to "find" and terminate those sessions vs moving on
with current findings. The defaults may need to be adjusted further
depending on the production environment.

TEAMS NOTIFICATIONS

Minor changes in an effort to better clarify the purpose of the lead-in
content:

  • explicit step X of Y labeling to notification titles
  • consistent use of Note (preferred) and Error (fallback) field values
    to generate primary "summary" text
  • rename "Request Annotations" to "Request Errors" to reflect
    dedicated single purpose vs blend of Note and Error field values as
    before

ADDITIONAL SUPPORT

During development, the necessary code to interact with EZProxy was
first created as a local package, but was eventually moved to a
separate module in order to break out the changes for separate use.

See the atc0005/go-ezproxy project for further information on that
module.

Two separate binaries were created during testing:

  • mock ezproxy binary which returns known return codes and results +
    some extra to help condition validation checks for what I believe
    will be unknown/unpublished return codes I've yet to encounter

  • es binary used to search for and optionally terminate active user
    sessions for a specified username. This binary supports the same
    search retry and delay settings as brick

REFERENCES

@atc0005 atc0005 added this to the v0.2.0 milestone Jun 30, 2020
@atc0005 atc0005 self-assigned this Jun 30, 2020
@atc0005 atc0005 force-pushed the ezproxy-sessions-prep-for-v0.2.0-release branch 7 times, most recently from 938cb8e to 302d5a4 Compare June 30, 2020 12:13
BACKSTORY

Not long after giving a demo on using brick + fail2ban to timeout
existing sessions, I stumbled across another project on GitHub which
uses `ezproxy kill` to terminate an active user session:

- https://github.com/calvinm/ezproxy-abuse-checker/blob/d7202e617305745cf272df9918b1e95ff030f63f/block_user.pl#L32
- https://github.com/calvinm/ezproxy-abuse-checker/blob/master/block_user.pl

Despite OCLC Support indicating otherwise, native support for
terminating user sessions was clearly available. This built-in support
offers a much safer/localized effect vs banning the IP associated
with a reported account; banning the IP has the potential to have a
much larger splash radius blocking legitimate user accounts.

The primary developer for the `calvinm/ezproxy-abuse-checker` project
confirmed that they learned of this support on the EZProxy mailing
list: calvinm/ezproxy-abuse-checker#1

This is encouraging, as I am (at least a little) optimistic that this
unpublished support will persist in future versions, at least until
official, fully documented and supported functionality for terminating
sessions is included.

IMPLEMENTATION

This commit adds (optional) support for terminating user sessions
using the official EZProxy binary already present on EZproxy servers.
The fully-qualified location of this binary is configurable via
command-line flag, environment variable or TOML-format configuration
file. Additional settings are provided to tune the sessions search
process such as configurable retries and search delay.

The session termination process involves reading current sessions from
the Active Users and Hosts "state" file that EZproxy uses to track
sessions and hosts managed by EZProxy and then using the EZproxy
binary to terminate each session via the `kill` subcommand.

As part of the early development efforts I initially tried to use the
latest Audit logs to pull session IDs, but quickly realized that while
the format was easier to parse, it was far less stable due to log
rotation and the need to resolve the active state ourselves (logins
minus logouts, minus timeouts, etc). Some of that support still
remains as of this commit, but may be removed in a future release if
found to not be needed. As of this writing I believe it can still be
used as part of interacting with a future endpoint.

The aforementioned search delay and retry settings are provided to
work around an observed race condition between EZproxy recording state
changes and other applications (such as ours) attempting to read the
current state. The delay in EZproxy writing the changes to disk (or
kernel settings?) may result in our application attempting to
terminate sessions related to a monitoring system report and not
finding them within the Active Users and Hosts "state" file.

The defaults attempt to strike a balance between waiting a little
longer in order to "find" and terminate those sessions vs moving on
with current findings. The defaults may need to be adjusted further
depending on the production environment.

TEAMS NOTIFICATIONS

Minor changes in an effort to better clarify the purpose of the lead-in
content:

- explicit `step X of Y` labeling to notification titles
- consistent use of Note (preferred) and Error (fallback) field values
  to generate primary "summary" text
- rename "Request Annotations" to "Request Errors" to reflect
  dedicated single purpose vs blend of Note and Error field values as
  before

ADDITIONAL SUPPORT

During development, the necessary code to interact with EZProxy was
first created as a local package, but was eventually moved to a
separate module in order to break out the changes for separate use.

See the `atc0005/go-ezproxy` project for further information on that
module.

Two separate binaries were created during testing:

- mock `ezproxy` binary which returns known return codes and results +
  some extra to help condition validation checks for what I believe
  will be unknown/unpublished return codes I've yet to encounter

- `es` binary used to search for and optionally terminate active user
  sessions for a specified username. This binary supports the same
  search retry and delay settings as `brick`

refs GH-31, GH-59
@atc0005 atc0005 force-pushed the ezproxy-sessions-prep-for-v0.2.0-release branch from 302d5a4 to 2d6f14c Compare June 30, 2020 12:22
@atc0005 atc0005 merged commit 3ddd3c0 into master Jun 30, 2020
@atc0005 atc0005 deleted the ezproxy-sessions-prep-for-v0.2.0-release branch June 30, 2020 12:54
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