User-Controlled Session Manager for Remote Token Invalidation
Find Innovative SolutionsGenerate Solutions
Solution Overview
Problem
Online service providers often fail to adequately invalidate session identifiers after a user ends a session, leading to security vulnerabilities and increased risk of session hijacking and malicious attacks, as users lack transparency and control over session management.
Innovation Solution
A user-controlled session manager (UCSM) system that receives and hashes session IDs, allowing users to terminate sessions remotely by updating the session status, which notifies the service provider to invalidate the session ID, thereby enhancing security and user control.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If service providers maintain simple session management without user control, then device complexity is reduced, but security reliability deteriorates due to inadequate session invalidation
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces a session manager as an intermediary component between the user and the service provider. The session manager receives session identifiers from the service provider, stores them in a database, and enables users to remotely terminate sessions by submitting termination requests. This intermediary layer enhances security by providing centralized session tracking and invalidation capabilities without requiring the service provider to implement complex session management logic, thus resolving the contradiction between security reliability and device complexity.
2Ease of operation
If service providers automatically invalidate session IDs on logout, then security is improved, but user control and transparency are lost
Solution Approach 1:
The patent implements a self-service mechanism where users can independently manage and terminate their own sessions through the session manager interface. Users receive notifications about active sessions and can selectively terminate them without requiring service provider intervention. This self-service approach empowers users with direct control over their session security while maintaining reliable session invalidation through the centralized session manager, thus resolving the contradiction between user control and session invalidation reliability.
3Loss of information
If service providers implement comprehensive session tracking, then security monitoring is improved, but loss of user privacy and transparency increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent inverts the traditional session tracking model by shifting control from the service provider to the user. Instead of the service provider monitoring and managing sessions unilaterally, the session manager enables users to query and terminate their own sessions. The service provider's role is reduced to merely providing session identifiers to the session manager, which then handles all tracking and management operations. This inversion improves session status visibility to users while minimizing the service provider's involvement in session monitoring, thus resolving the contradiction between session transparency and session status visibility.
Data Source
AI summary
There are provided systems and methods for a user-controlled session manager to provide remote disabling of session tokens. An online service provider, such as a user-controlled session manager, may provide service to manage sessions between user's devices and other online service provider platforms, such as login and use sessions that exchange messages and data. The session manager may receive hashed values of session IDs from the service providers hosting the sessions, which may be used to securely identify the sessions without compromising the session IDs to malicious parties. The session manager may provide a functionality to allow the user to view session statuses, as well as change their statuses to indicate that the sessions can be terminated. The session manager may update the status so that when the service provider pings the session manager for the status, the session's status is updated to be inactive.