There's no need to perform an authentication check in the socket.io
middleware because `PadMessageHandler.handleMessage` calls
`SecurityMananger.checkAccess` and that now performs authentication
and authorization checks.
This change also improves the user experience: Before, access denials
caused socket.io error events in the client, which `pad.js` mostly
ignores (the user doesn't see anything). Now a deny message is sent
back to the client, which causes `pad.js` to display an obvious
permission denied message.
This also fixes a minor bug: `settings.loadTest` is supposed to bypass
authentication and authorization checks, but they weren't bypassed
because `SecurityManager.checkAccess` did not check
`settings.loadTest`.
Before, anyone who could create a socket.io connection to Etherpad
could read, modify, and create pads at will without authenticating
first.
The `checkAccess` middleware in `webaccess.js` normally handles
authentication and authorization, but it does not run for `/socket.io`
requests. This means that the connection handler in `socketio.js` must
handle authentication and authorization. However, before this change:
* The handler did not require a signed `express_sid` cookie.
* After loading the express-session state, the handler did not check
to see if the user had authenticated.
Now the handler requires a signed `express_sid` cookie, and it ensures
that `socket.request.session.user` is non-null if authentication is
required. (`socket.request.session.user` is non-null if and only if
the user has authenticated.)
The "io" cookie is created by socket.io, and its purpose is to offer an handle
to perform load balancing with session stickiness when the library falls back to
long polling or below.
In Etherpad's case, if an operator needs to load balance, he can use the
"express_sid" cookie, and thus "io" is of no use.
Moreover, socket.io API does not offer a way of setting the "secure" flag on it,
and thus is a liability.
Let's simply nuke it.
References:
https://socket.io/docs/using-multiple-nodes/#Sticky-load-balancinghttps://github.com/socketio/socket.io/issues/2276#issuecomment-147184662 (not totally true, actually, see above)
When using plugins, the express server gets restarted. When we do that,
the socketio-server should also get restarted. It doesn't. That means
that all the events in SocketIORouter.js are bound twice, which causes
chaos all over etherpad.
This changes our socketio.js so it fully recreates the io-instance when
we restart the server.
introduced in 95e7b0f156, but catching
that would have been hard.