Azure AD Easy Auth expires even when users are act

Question

We have a Single Page App (SPA) that uses Azure Active Directory "Easy Auth", e.g., the code-less solution. This seems to work ok when users first open the the application. They are redirected to the Microsoft login page and they can authenticate and then access the application.

Then, because its an SPA, users will navigate around and only fire Ajax requests. The problems come approximately 24 hours later when the session cookie expires. Users likely still have the same browser tab open and do not perform a full page refresh. Then they may be working on a record and at some point their next Ajax PUT request fails with a Redirect HTTP status and they loose their work.

So they key question is:

How can we make SPA Ajax requests extend a current user's session so that their session will not expire when they are actively using the application?

It seems like the Azure AD Easy Auth service does not "honor" activity on the part of the user, which leads us to believe that the session cookie never gets updated.

Note: We've recently done some testing with the /.auth/refresh endpoint and this does not solve the problem either.

Answer 1

There are several ways you can possibly solve this. Here are a few that I can think of:

1. Use local storage: The problem you mentioned is that user's lose their work due to the redirects. The problem of losing work can be solved if you persist the in-progress state in local storage so that it's available when they are redirected back to the page.
2. Switch to using tokens: The /.auth/refresh endpoint doesn't refresh the AppServiceAuthSession when using AAD because AAD doesn't support refreshing the user information. What you can do instead is authenticate with your backend using the x-zumo-auth tokens. The /.auth/refresh endpoint will correctly refresh these tokens. If you're explicitly logging in users using /.auth/login/aad, then you can add the session_mode=token as a query string parameter. This is done for you if you use the Mobile Apps JavaScript SDK. If login is automatic, then you'll need to add session_mode=token in the additionalLoginParams setting of your auth config. You can then parse the authentication token from the #token fragment which is added to the URL after the login completes.
3. Use hidden iframes: I haven't tried this myself, but if you can get it working it might require the least amount of code change. The idea is that you use a hidden iframe to re-login the user periodically when you detect they are active. The iframe would need to point to something like ./auth/login/aad?prompt=none&domain_hint={userdomain.com} where {userdomain.com} is the last part of the user's email address - e.g. contoso.com. These parameters get passed to the AAD login page, and the login should complete automatically without any user interaction. Test it manually a few times in a browser window to make sure it works correctly. The result should be an updated auth cookie with a fresh expiration.

Let me know in the comments if you have any questions or issues with any of these options.