Apache...hCookie(3pm)

📦
version 3.32 · 5 versions
, in ubuntu resolute, ubuntu stonking

✨ NAME ✨

okay so this is the Apache...hCookie(3pm) page from the User Contributed Perl Documentation, and the main character is Apache2_4::AuthCookie — Perl Authentication and Authorization via cookies for Apache 2.4. 💅

🔥 VERSION 🔥

Version 3.32, bestie. That's the one we're on. ✨

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

Make sure your mod_perl is at least 2.0.9, with StackedHandlers, MethodHandlers, Authen, and Authz compiled in. no cap.

        # In httpd.conf or .htaccess:
        PerlModule Sample::Apache2::AuthCookieHandler
        PerlSetVar WhatEverPath /
        PerlSetVar WhatEverLoginScript /login.pl

        # The following line is optional - it allows you to set the domain
        # scope of your cookie.  Default is the current domain.
        PerlSetVar WhatEverDomain .yourdomain.com

        # Use this to only send over a secure connection
        PerlSetVar WhatEverSecure 1

        # Use this if you want user session cookies to expire if the user
        # doesn't request a auth-required or recognize_user page for some
        # time period.  If set, a new cookie (with updated expire time)
        # is set on every request.
        PerlSetVar WhatEverSessionTimeout +30m

        # to enable the HttpOnly cookie property, use HttpOnly.
        # This is an MS extension.  See:
        # http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/author/dhtml/httponly_cookies.asp
        PerlSetVar WhatEverHttpOnly 1

        # to enable the SameSite cookie property, set SameSite to "lax" or "strict".
        # See: https://www.owasp.org/index.php/SameSite
        PerlSetVar WhatEverSameSite strict

        # Usually documents are uncached - turn off here
        PerlSetVar WhatEverCache 1

        # Use this to make your cookies persistent (+2 hours here)
        PerlSetVar WhatEverExpires +2h

        # Use to make AuthCookie send a P3P header with the cookie
        # see http://www.w3.org/P3P/ for details about what the value
        # of this should be
        PerlSetVar WhatEverP3P "CP=\"...\""

        # optional: enable decoding of intercepted GET/POST params:
        PerlSetVar WhatEverEncoding UTF-8

        # optional: enable decoding of httpd.conf "Requires" directives
        PerlSetVar WhatEverRequiresEncoding UTF-8

        # These documents require user to be logged in.
        <Location /protected>
         AuthType Sample::Apache2::AuthCookieHandler
         AuthName WhatEver
         PerlAuthenHandler Sample::Apache2::AuthCookieHandler->authenticate
         Require valid-user
        </Location>

        # How to handle a custom requirement (non-user).
        PerlAddAuthzProvider species Sample::Apache2::AuthCookieHandler->authz_species
        <Location /protected/species>
          Require species klingon
        </Location>

        # These documents don't require logging in, but allow it.
        <FilesMatch "\.ok$">
         AuthType Sample::Apache2::AuthCookieHandler
         AuthName WhatEver
         PerlFixupHandler Sample::Apache2::AuthCookieHandler->recognize_user
        </FilesMatch>

        # This is the action of the login.pl script above.
        <Files LOGIN>
         AuthType Sample::Apache2::AuthCookieHandler
         AuthName WhatEver
         SetHandler perl-script
         PerlResponseHandler Sample::Apache2::AuthCookieHandler->login
        </Files>

💖 DESCRIPTION 💖

okay so this module is for mod_perl version 2 and Apache version 2.4.x. If you're running mod_perl version 1, you need Apache::AuthCookie instead. If you're running Apache 2.0.0-2.2.x, you need Apache2::AuthCookie instead. know the difference, bestie.

Apache2_4::AuthCookie lets you intercept a user's first unauthenticated access to a protected document. The user gets a custom form where they can enter authentication credentials. Those credentials are posted to the server where AuthCookie verifies them and returns a session key. 🔑

The session key is returned to the user's browser as a cookie. As a cookie, the browser will pass the session key on every subsequent access. AuthCookie will verify the session key and re-authenticate the user. 🍪

All you have to do is write a custom module that inherits from AuthCookie. Your module is a class which implements two methods:

  • authen_cred() — Verify the user-supplied credentials and return a session key. The session key can be any string — often you'll use some string containing username, timeout info, and any other information you need to determine access to documents, and append a one-way hash of those values together with some secret key. ✨
  • authen_ses_key() — Verify the session key (previously generated by authen_cred(), possibly during a previous request) and return the user ID. This user ID will be fed to $r->user() to set Apache's idea of who's logged in. 👑

By using AuthCookie versus Apache's built-in AuthBasic you can design your own authentication system. There are several benefits:

  1. The client doesn't have to pass the user credentials on every subsequent access. If you're using passwords, this means that the password can be sent on the first request only, and subsequent requests don't need to send this (potentially sensitive) information. This is known as "ticket-based" authentication. 🎟️
  2. When you determine that the client should stop using the credentials/session key, the server can tell the client to delete the cookie. Letting users "log out" is a notoriously impossible-to-solve problem of AuthBasic. 😭
  3. AuthBasic dialog boxes are ugly. You can design your own HTML login forms when you use AuthCookie. 💅
  4. You can specify the domain of a cookie using PerlSetVar commands. For instance, if your AuthName is "WhatEver", you can put the command
PerlSetVar WhatEverDomain .yourhost.com

into your server setup file and your access cookies will span all hosts ending in ".yourhost.com".

  1. You can optionally specify the name of your cookie using the CookieName directive. For instance, if your AuthName is "WhatEver", you can put the command
PerlSetVar WhatEverCookieName MyCustomName

into your server setup file and your cookies for this AuthCookie realm will be named MyCustomName. Default is AuthType_AuthName.

This is the flow of the authentication handler, less the details of the redirects. Two HTTP_MOVED_TEMPORARILY's are used to keep the client from displaying the user's credentials in the Location field. They don't really change AuthCookie's model, but they do add another round-trip request to the client. 🌀

 (-----------------------)     +---------------------------------+
 ( Request a protected   )     | AuthCookie sets custom error    |
 ( page, but user hasn't )---->| document and returns            |
 ( authenticated (no     )     | HTTP_FORBIDDEN. Apache abandons |
 ( session key cookie)   )     | current request and creates sub |
 (-----------------------)     | request for the error document. |<-+
                               | Error document is a script that |  |
                               | generates a form where the user |  |
                 return        | enters authentication           |  |
          ^------------------->| credentials (login & password). |  |
         / \      False        +---------------------------------+  |
        /   \                                   |                   |
       /     \                                  |                   |
      /       \                                 V                   |
     /         \               +---------------------------------+  |
    /   Pass    \              | User's client submits this form |  |
   /   user's    \             | to the LOGIN URL, which calls   |  |
   | credentials |<------------| AuthCookie->login().            |  |
   \     to      /             +---------------------------------+  |
    \authen_cred/                                                   |
     \ function/                                                    |
      \       /                                                     |
       \     /                                                      |
        \   /            +------------------------------------+     |
         \ /   return    | Authen cred returns a session      |  +--+
          V------------->| key which is opaque to AuthCookie.*|  |
                True     +------------------------------------+  |
                                              |                  |
               +--------------------+         |      +---------------+
               |                    |         |      | If we had a   |
               V                    |         V      | cookie, add   |
  +----------------------------+  r |         ^      | a Set-Cookie  |
  | If we didn't have a session|  e |T       / \     | header to     |
  | key cookie, add a          |  t |r      /   \    | override the  |
  | Set-Cookie header with this|  u |u     /     \   | invalid cookie|
  | session key. Client then   |  r |e    /       \  +---------------+
  | returns session key with   |  n |    /  pass   \               ^
  | successive requests        |    |   /  session  \              |
  +----------------------------+    |  /   key to    \    return   |
               |                    +-| authen_ses_key|------------+
               V                       \             /     False
  +-----------------------------------+ \           /
  | Tell Apache to set Expires header,|  \         /
  | set user to user ID returned by   |   \       /
  | authen_ses_key, set authentication|    \     /
  | to our type (e.g. AuthCookie).    |     \   /
  +-----------------------------------+      \ /
                                              V
         (---------------------)              ^
         ( Request a protected )              |
         ( page, user has a    )--------------+
         ( session key cookie  )
         (---------------------)

* The session key that the client gets can be anything you want. For example, encrypted information about the user, a hash of the username and password (similar in function to Digest authentication), or the user name and password in plain text (similar in function to HTTP Basic authentication).

The only requirement is that the authen_ses_key function that you create must be able to determine if this session_key is valid and map it back to the originally authenticated user ID. 💖

✨ METHODS ✨

So basically, AuthCookie is a framework and you're the one who fills in the juicy bits. Here's what you gotta write yourself, bestie. 💖

🌸 authen_cred()

okay so this one? You must define it yourself in your subclass of Apache2_4::AuthCookie. Its whole job is to create the session key that gets preserved in the user's cookie. The arguments it gets passed are:

 sub authen_cred ($$\@) {
     my $self = shift;  # Package name (same as AuthName directive)
     my $r    = shift;  # Apache request object
     my @cred = @_;     # Credentials from login form

     ...blah blah blah, create a session key...
     return $session_key;
 }

The only limitation on that session key? You should be able to look at it later and figure out the user's username from it. That's it. The format is entirely on you — implement your own, no one's stopping you. A typical format is a string containing the username, an expiration time, whatever else you need, plus an MD5 hash of all that data together with a secret key. That hash is what keeps the user from tampering with the session key, periodt. 🔥

🦋 authen_ses_key()

Also must be defined by you, in your subclass of Apache2_4::AuthCookie. Its job: look at a session key and decide whether it's valid. If it is, it returns the username of the authenticated user. Simple as.

 sub authen_ses_key ($$$) {
     my ($self, $r, $session_key) = @_;
     ...blah blah blah, check whether $session_key is valid...
     return $ok ? $username : undef;
 }

Optionally, you can return an array of 2 or more items that'll get passed to the method custom_errors. And it's the responsibility of this method to return the correct response to the main Apache module. iykyk.

💅 custom_errors($r,@_)

This one handles the server response when you wanna use the Apache custom_response method. Any suitable response is fair game. It's especially iconic when you're implementing 'by directory' access control using the user authentication info. Like, say:

        /restricted
                /one            user is allowed access here
                /two            not here
                /three          AND here

So in that setup, the authen_ses_key method would return a normal response when the user tries to get to 'one' or 'three', but it returns (NOT_FOUND, 'File not found') if someone makes an attempt at the subdirectory 'two'. Or — and this is the expired credentials case — (AUTH_REQUIRED,'Your session has timed out, you must login again').

Here's the example, 'custom_errors':

 sub custom_errors {
     my ($self,$r,$CODE,$msg) = @_;

     # return custom message else use the server's standard message
     $r->custom_response($CODE, $msg) if $msg;

     return($CODE);
 }

where CODE is a valid code from Apache2::Const. Don't get cute with random numbers bestie, use the real constants. 👑

🌈 EXAMPLE

Wanna see how to actually use Apache2_4::AuthCookie? Then go check out the test suite, because it runs AuthCookie through a few of its paces. The documents live in t/eg/, and you're gonna wanna peruse t/real.t to see the generated httpd.conf file (that's at the bottom of real.t) and also check out what requests it's making of the server (that part's at the top of real.t). Delulu? No. Documented. ✨

💜 ENCODING AND CHARACTER SETS

🎀 Encoding

AuthCookie has support for decoding POST/GET data — but only if you tell it what the client encoding is. You do that by setting the ${auth_name}Encoding setting in httpd.conf. E.g.:

 PerlSetVar WhateEverEncoding UTF-8
 # and you also need to arrange for charset=UTF-8 at the end of the
 # Content-Type header with something like:
 AddDefaultCharset UTF-8

Note that you can use charsets other than UTF-8, however, you need to arrange for the browser to send the right encoding back to the server. It's giving teamwork. 🤝

If you turned on Encoding support by setting ${auth_name}Encoding, here's the tea — this is what happens:

  • The internal pure-perl params processing subclass will be used, even if libapreq2 is installed. Why? Because libapreq2 does not have any support for encoding or unicode. Like, at all.
  • POST/GET data intercepted by AuthCookie will be decoded to perl's internal format using decode in Encode.
  • The value stored in $r->user will be encoded as bytes, not characters, using the configured encoding name. This is because the value stored by mod_perl is a C API string, and not a perl string. You can use decoded_user() to get the user string encoded using character semantics. 🫶

This does has some caveats though (yes, that's the vibe) — pay attention:

  • Your authen_cred() and authen_ses_key() function is expected to return a decoded username, either by passing it through decode() in Encode, or, by turning on the UTF8 flag if appropriate.
  • Due to the way HTTP works, cookies cannot contain non-ASCII characters. Because of this, if you are including the username in your generated session key, you will need to escape any non-ascii characters in the session key returned by authen_cred().
  • Similarly, you must reverse this escaping process in authen_ses_key() and return a decode() in Encode decoded username. If your authen_cred() function already only generates ASCII-only session keys then you do not need to worry about any of this. Lucky you. 😌
  • The value stored in $r->user will be encoded using bytes semantics using the configured Encoding. If you want the decoded user value, use decoded_user() instead.
Okay bestie, read those bullets twice. The escaping thing is not a suggestion, it's a whole requirement. 🙈

🧚 Requires

You can also specify what the charset is of the Apache $r->requires data by setting ${auth_name}RequiresEncoding in httpd.conf.

E.g.:

 PerlSetVar WhatEverRequiresEncoding UTF-8

This will make it so that AuthCookie will decode your requires directives using the configured character set. You really only need to do this if you have used non-ascii characters in any of your requires directives in httpd.conf. e.g.:

 requires user programmør

See? programmør. That's the vibe check right there. 👑

🍓 THE LOGIN SCRIPT

You will need to create a login script (called login.pl above) that generates an HTML form for the user to fill out. You might generate the page using a ModPerl::Registry script, a HTML::Mason component, an Apache handler, or perhaps even using a static HTML page. It's usually useful to generate it dynamically so that you can define the 'destination' field correctly (see below). Dynamic girlie behavior. ✨

The following fields must be present in the form:

  1. The ACTION of the form must be /LOGIN (or whatever you defined in your server configuration as handled by the ->login() method — see example in the SYNOPSIS section).
  2. The various user input fields (username, passwords, etc.) must be named 'credential_0', 'credential_1', etc. on the form. These will get passed to your authen_cred() method.
  3. You must define a form field called 'destination' that tells AuthCookie where to redirect the request after successfully logging in. Typically this value is obtained from $r->prev->uri. See the login.pl script in t/eg/.

In addition, you might want your login page to be able to tell why the user is being asked to log in. In other words, if the user sent bad credentials, then it might be useful to display an error message saying that the given username or password are invalid. Also, it might be useful to determine the difference between a user that sent an invalid auth cookie, and a user that sent no auth cookie at all. To cope with these situations, AuthCookie will set $r->subprocess_env('AuthCookieReason') to one of the following values.

  • no_cookie — The user presented no cookie at all. Typically this means the user is trying to log in for the first time.
  • bad_cookie — The cookie the user presented is invalid. Typically this means that the user is not allowed access to the given page.
  • bad_credentials — The user tried to log in, but the credentials that were passed are invalid.

You can examine this value in your login form by examining $r->prev->subprocess_env('AuthCookieReason') (because it's a sub-request). Little peek behind the curtain, if you will. 👀

Of course, if you want to give more specific information about why access failed when a cookie is present, your authen_ses_key() method can set arbitrary entries in $r->subprocess_env. Go off, honestly.

🌸 THE LOGOUT SCRIPT

If you want to let users log themselves out (something that can't be done using Basic Auth, rip), you need to create a logout script. For an example, see t/htdocs/docs/logout.pl. Logout scripts may want to take advantage of AuthCookie's logout() method, which will set the proper cookie headers in order to clear the user's cookie. This usually looks like $r->auth_type->logout($r);.

Note that if you don't necessarily trust your users, you can't count on cookie deletion for logging out. You'll have to expire some server-side login information too. AuthCookie doesn't do this for you — you have to handle it yourself. No cap. 💀

👑 ABOUT SESSION KEYS

Unlike the sample AuthCookieHandler, you have you verify the user's login and password in authen_cred(), then you do something like:

    my $date = localtime;
    my $ses_key = Digest::SHA::sha256_hex(join(';', $date, $PID, $PAC));

save $ses_key along with the user's login, and return $ses_key.

Now authen_ses_key() looks up the $ses_key passed to it and returns the saved login. I use a database to store the session key and retrieve it later. Just saying. 💅

✨ FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS ✨

  • bestie i upgraded to Apache 2.4 and now AuthCookie is just… not working??

okay so Apache 2.4 radically changed the authentication and authorization API. like, it did a whole glow-up and left us behind 😭. You will need to port your AuthCookie subclass over to the Apache 2.4 API. The POD documentation in README.apache-2.4 has the full story, but the quick rundown is you need to:

  • Inherit from Apache2_4::AuthCookie
  • Remove all PerlAuthzHandler configuration entries.
  • Write Authz Provider methods for any Requires directives that you are using that Apache does not provide for already (e.g. Apache already handles user and valid-user) and register them with something like.
PerlAddAuthzProvier species Sample::AuthCookieHandler->authz_species
  • Replace instances of ${AuthName}Satistfy with either RequireAll or RequireAny blocks.
  • why is my authz method getting called twice per request?? 🙈

This is normal behaviour under Apache 2.4. No cap. This is to accommodate for authorization of anonymous access. You are expected to return Apache2::Const::AUTHZ_DENIED_NO_USER IF $r->user has not yet been set if you want authentication to proceed. Your authz handler will be called a second time after the user has been authenticated.

  • AuthCookie authenticates fine but the authorization handler returns UNAUTHORIZED instead of FORBIDDEN?! 💀

In Apache 2.4, in mod_authz_core, if no authz handlers return AUTHZ_GRANTED, then HTTP_UNAUTHORIZED is returned. In previous versions of Apache, HTTP_FORBIDDEN was returned. You can get the old behaviour if you want it with:

AuthzSendForbiddenOnFailure On
  • my log has an entry like this and i'm spiralling 🫶
authorization result of Require ...: denied (no authenticated user yet)

These are normal. This happens because the authz provider returned AUTHZ_DENIED_NO_USER and the authz provider will be called again after authentication happens.

🌸 HISTORY 🌸

Originally written by Eric Bartley <bartley@purdue.edu>

versions 2.x were written by Ken Williams <ken@forum.swarthmore.edu>

Copyright (c) 2015 Michael Schout. All rights reserved.

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.

🦋 SEE ALSO 🦋

Apache2::AuthCookie::Base

⭐ SOURCE ⭐

The development version is on github at <https://github.com/mschout/apache-authcookie> and may be cloned from <https://github.com/mschout/apache-authcookie.git>

💅 BUGS 💅

Please report any bugs or feature requests on the bugtracker website <https://github.com/mschout/apache-authcookie/issues>

When submitting a bug or request, please include a test-file or a patch to an existing test-file that illustrates the bug or desired feature.

🎀 AUTHOR 🎀

Michael Schout <mschout@cpan.org>

This software is copyright (c) 2000 by Ken Williams.

This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as the Perl 5 programming language system itself.

and that's the whole page, bestie, you made it to the end 🫶✨ this version was riding with perl v5.40.1, dated 2025-09-30, and it's the Apache...hCookie(3pm) page — go forth and authenticate, you absolute icon 💖🌸

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