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IDP versus RP session#

Applications generally have their own session cookie (the "RP Session"). This makes sense, because the RP only redirects to the IDP for authentication if it cannot find its own local cookie. If a user has a session with many RP's, achieving simultaneous logout across all sites is a challenge--something which your business leaders may not appreciate. While OpenID proposes several solutions to logout, none are ideal. Fundamentally, logout is an asynchronous challenge. A given RP may be disconnected from the network. Thus logout messages sent to RP's that are not received must be replayed. The IETF Sec Events Workgroup has been working on standards to handle logout (and other asynchronous requirements). But adoption of this architecture is not common.

Another challenge of RP sessions is that they may have a different timeout for inactivity. See the Janssen Planning Guide page on Timeout Management for more details.


Last update: 2024-09-27
Created: 2022-07-21