- This is a 'front-port' of the already existing patch on v1.21 and
v1.20, but applied on top of what Gitea has done to rework the LTA
mechanism. Forgejo will stick with the reworked mechanism by the Forgejo
Security team for the time being. The removal of legacy code (AES-GCM) has been
left out.
- The current architecture is inherently insecure, because you can
construct the 'secret' cookie value with values that are available in
the database. Thus provides zero protection when a database is
dumped/leaked.
- This patch implements a new architecture that's inspired from: [Paragonie Initiative](https://paragonie.com/blog/2015/04/secure-authentication-php-with-long-term-persistence#secure-remember-me-cookies).
- Integration testing is added to ensure the new mechanism works.
- Removes a setting, because it's not used anymore.
(cherry picked from commit e3d6622a63)
(cherry picked from commit fef1a6dac5)
(cherry picked from commit b0c5165145)
(cherry picked from commit 7ad51b9f8d)
Closes#27455
> The mechanism responsible for long-term authentication (the 'remember
me' cookie) uses a weak construction technique. It will hash the user's
hashed password and the rands value; it will then call the secure cookie
code, which will encrypt the user's name with the computed hash. If one
were able to dump the database, they could extract those two values to
rebuild that cookie and impersonate a user. That vulnerability exists
from the date the dump was obtained until a user changed their password.
>
> To fix this security issue, the cookie could be created and verified
using a different technique such as the one explained at
https://paragonie.com/blog/2015/04/secure-authentication-php-with-long-term-persistence#secure-remember-me-cookies.
The PR removes the now obsolete setting `COOKIE_USERNAME`.
