Session options

There are two settings that are available for the user’s session. The first one is the session expiration time, which is only applicable to token and header authentication strategies:

spec:
  login_token:
    # By default, users session expires in 24 hours.
    expiration_seconds: 86400

The session expiration time is the amount of time before the user is asked to extend his session by another cycle. It does not matter if the user is actively using Kiali, the user will be asked if the session should be extended.

The second available option is the signing key configuration, which is unset by default, meaning that a random 16-character signing key will be generated and stored to a secret named kiali-signing-key, in Kiali’s installation namespace:

spec:
  login_token:
    # By default, create a random signing key and store it in
    # a secret named "kiali-signing-key".
    signing_key: ""

If the secret already exists (which may mean a previous Kiali installation was present), then the secret is reused.

The signing key is used on security sensitive data. For example, one of the usages is to sign HTTP cookies related to the user session to prevent session forgery.

If you need to set a custom fixed key, you can pre-create or modify the kiali-signing-key secret:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Secret
metadata:
  namespace: "kiali-installation-namespace"
  name: kiali-signing-key
type: Opaque
data:
  key: "<your signing key encoded in base64>"

If you prefer a different secret name for the signing key and/or a different key-value pair of the secret, you can specify your preferred names in the Kiali CR:

spec:
  login_token:
    signing_key: "secret:<secretName>:<secretDataKey>"