When are user roles refreshed and how to force it?

Question

First off, I'm not using FOSUserBundle and I can't because I'm porting a legacy system which has its own Model layer (no Doctrine/Mongo/whatsoever here) and other very custom behavior.

I'm trying to connect my legacy role system with Symfony's so I can use native symfony security in controllers and views.

My first attempt was to load and return all of the user's roles in the getRoles() method from the Symfony\Component\Security\Core\User\UserInterface. At first, it looked like that worked. But after taking a deeper look, I noticed that these roles are only refreshed when the user logs in. This means that if I grant or revoke roles from a user, he will have to log out and back in for the changes to take effect. However, if I revoke security roles from a user, I want that to be applied immediately, so that behavior isn't acceptable to me.

What I want Symfony to do is to reload a user's roles on every request to make sure they're up-to-date. I have implemented a custom user provider and its refreshUser(UserInterface $user) method is being called on every request but the roles somehow aren't being refreshed.

The code to load / refresh the user in my UserProvider looks something like this:

public function loadUserByUsername($username) {
    $user = UserModel::loadByUsername($username); // Loads a fresh user object including roles!
    if (!$user) {
        throw new UsernameNotFoundException("User not found");
    }
    return $user;
}

(refreshUser looks similar)

Is there a way to make Symfony refresh user roles on each request?

Answer 1

So after a couple of days trying to find a viable solution and contributing to the Symfony2 user mailing list, I finally found it. The following has been derived from the discussion at https://groups.google.com/d/topic/symfony2/NDBb4JN3mNc/discussion

It turns out that there's an interface Symfony\Component\Security\Core\User\EquatableInterface that is not intended for comparing object identity but precisely to

test if two objects are equal in security and re-authentication context

Implement that interface in your user class (the one already implementing UserInterface). Implement the only required method isEqualTo(UserInterface $user) so that it returns false if the current user's roles differ from those of the passed user.

Note: The User object is serialized in the session. Because of the way serialization works, make sure to store the roles in a field of your user object, and do not retrieve them directly in the getRoles() Method, otherwise all of that won't work!

Here's an example of how the specific methods might look like:

protected $roles = null;

public function getRoles() {

    if ($this->roles == null) {
        $this->roles = ...; // Retrieve the fresh list of roles
                            // from wherever they are stored here
    }

    return $this->roles;
}

public function isEqualTo(UserInterface $user) {

    if ($user instanceof YourUserClass) {
        // Check that the roles are the same, in any order
        $isEqual = count($this->getRoles()) == count($user->getRoles());
        if ($isEqual) {
            foreach($this->getRoles() as $role) {
                $isEqual = $isEqual && in_array($role, $user->getRoles());
            }
        }
        return $isEqual;
    }

    return false;
}

Also, note that when the roles actually change and you reload the page, the profiler toolbar might tell you that your user is not authenticated. Plus, looking into the profiler, you might find that the roles didn't actually get refreshed.

I found out that the role refreshing actually does work. It's just that if no authorization constraints are hit (no @Secure annotations, no required roles in the firewall etc.), the refreshing is not actually done and the user is kept in the "unauthenticated" state.

As soon as you hit a page that performs any kind of authorization check, the user roles are being refreshed and the profiler toolbar displays the user with a green dot and "Authenticated: yes" again.

That's an acceptable behavior for me - hope it was helpful :)