Identity Cloud

Client-side sessions

Identity Cloud creates sessions either as client-side sessions or server-side sessions. The session location depends on the session configuration.

Client-side sessions are those where Identity Cloud returns the entire session state to the client after a request. Identity Cloud returns the session state to the client in a session cookie. The cookie is then passed back to Identity Cloud with each subsequent request.

Client-side authentication sessions

Identity Cloud uses authentication sessions to manage authentication journeys before a user has authenticated successfully.

Authentication sessions are configured as client-side sessions by default.

During authentication, the authentication session state is returned to the client after each call to the authenticate endpoint, and stored in the authId object of the JSON response.

Storing authentication sessions on the client lets Identity Cloud handle the authentication flow at any point in time without load balancing requirements.

For realms configured for server-side sessions, Identity Cloud attempts to invalidate client-side authentication sessions after creating the server-side sessions.

Client-side sessions

Identity Cloud creates sessions after users' authentication flow have completed successfully.

For browser-based clients that use client-side sessions, Identity Cloud sets a cookie in the browser that contains the session state. When the browser returns the cookie, Identity Cloud decodes the session state from the cookie.

For REST-based clients, Identity Cloud sends the cookie in a header.

Session denylisting is an optional feature that maintains a list of logged out client-side sessions in the CTS token store. For more information about session termination and session denylisting, refer to Session termination.

Secure client-side sessions

It’s a best practice to configure Identity Cloud to sign and/or encrypt client-side sessions and client-side authentication sessions for security reasons. Because decrypting and verifying the session can be an expensive operation to perform on each request, Identity Cloud caches the decrypt sequence in memory to improve performance.

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