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<a class="user-hover" rel="cantor.2@osu.edu" id="email_cantor.2@osu.edu" href="https://issues.shibboleth.net/jira/secure/ViewProfile.jspa?name=cantor.2%40osu.edu" style="color:#326ca6;">Scott Cantor</a>
commented on <img src="https://issues.shibboleth.net/jira/images/icons/issuetypes/bug.png" height="16" width="16" border="0" align="absmiddle" alt="Bug"> <a style='color:#326ca6;text-decoration:none;' href='https://issues.shibboleth.net/jira/browse/IDP-474'>IDP-474</a>
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<a style='color:#326ca6;text-decoration:none;' href='https://issues.shibboleth.net/jira/browse/IDP-474'><strong>Avoid mapping the context root to the MVC servlet</strong></a>
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<div class="comment-block" style="background-color:#edf5ff;border:1px solid #dddddd;color:#000000;padding:12px;"><p>There are really two separate considerations with flows:</p>
<ul>
<li>how to invoke subflows by flow ID, used extensively in the system</li>
<li>how top-level flows are run via web requests</li>
</ul>
<p>The former is not affected by MVC at all, it's done by the SWF engine using the flow repository to map a flow ID to run into a pre-loaded pointer to the flow definition file. So web.xml doesn't matter for this.</p>
<p>The challenge with the URL -> flow mapping is that in general we can't prevent flows from ending up with multiple valid URLs unless we map the root, at least without replacing SWF code.</p>
<p>The logic that handles this is the DefaultFlowUrlHandler class, and it computes the flow ID to look for by checking PATH_INFO, then checking for a servlet path and stripping the file extension, and then checking for a context path. Typically one of the first two will return something to use.</p>
<p>When we map the root, everything becomes PATH_INFO, and so the whole path in the URL becomes the flow ID. If we change web.xml to map specific paths or subtrees, any flow can be executed if you can manipulate the URL so that either the PATH_INFO or the servlet path match a flow ID.</p>
<p>As an example, if we map "/profile/<b>", then any flow can be executed by appending its flow ID to /profile, even if we didn't intend that. Likewise, if we map "/ext/</b>" as a container for custom flows, any built-in flow can be run by appending the ID to /ext (e.g., you could run /ext/Shibboleth/SSO as well as /profile/Shibboleth/SSO to run the SAML 1 SSO profile flow).</p>
<p>The downside to that model is that it may create accidental exposures of URLs that should be protected by authentication rules but won't be. Not clear if that's a major problem given that failure to apply a rule would leave those flows unable to authenticate a user.</p>
<p>Another option is to just map servlet paths we intend to use ourselves for built-in flows, and then allow people to add their own mappings if they want them. That would encourage people to leave their own flows defined under /profile or perhaps occasionally to map explicit servlet paths they want to add.</p></div>
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