Sessionbased

Sessionbased refers to techniques and architectures that maintain state information about a user or client across multiple requests by creating a server-side session. It is commonly used in traditional web applications to manage authentication, user preferences, and transient data without requiring credentials on every request.

In a typical session-based system, a server creates a session when the user authenticates, stores data in a session store, and issues a session identifier to the client, usually via a cookie. The client sends the session ID with each request, enabling the server to retrieve the associated session data and apply the appropriate access controls or personalization.

Session data may include identity, roles, locale, shopping cart contents, or other per-user state. Session stores can be in-memory, on disk, or distributed caches to support scalability. Sessions have lifetimes defined by expiration, with optional activity-based refresh, and are invalidated at logout or after a timeout.

Security considerations include protecting session cookies (HttpOnly, Secure, SameSite), defending against session fixation and hijacking, rotating session identifiers on login, and enforcing proper invalidation on logout. Servers should store minimal sensitive data and consider token revocation strategies where applicable.

Compared with stateless, token-based approaches, session-based systems maintain server-side state and can simplify revocation and fine-grained access control but may introduce scaling challenges in distributed environments and are less suited for public APIs or mobile clients. Typical use cases are traditional server-rendered web apps, while modern architectures often prefer stateless authentication.