
### What is a Session? {#What-is-a-Session}

Let’s first understand how a web application or website like [Shopify Store handles user access](https://plugins.miniorange.com/session-management-for-shopify). Generally, there are three layers of security mechanisms:

- Authentication
- Session management
- Access control

Using these mechanisms the Store makes the user communicate with the server so that the communication is secured and no attacker can trap the communication. When a user/customer signs in to a store, the server does not know who the person behind the system is. To solve this problem the server creates a session for that user and that session is used across several web pages. The server also creates sessions to keep track of anonymous users after their very first request.

### Session management in Shopify {#Session-management-in-Shopify}

In Shopify, once the session has been established a session id is generated and is sent to the user browser. To maintain the authenticated state and to keep track of the user’s progress, Shopify provides users with a unique session identifier during the creation of the session and is shared between the users and application until the session is terminated. An attacker or hacker can attempt to launch an attack on the active session and hijack them, so it is mandatory to set expiration timeouts for every session. **The shorter the session interval is, the lesser the time an attacker has to use the valid session ID.**

If the user logs out from the Store or doesn’t use the Store for some desired time then the session will be dead. A common scenario when the user state changes from authenticated to unauthenticated include password change, permission changes, etc. if that happens then the old session id must be terminated, and a new session id will be used for all further requests made to the Store application.

**If you are logged in to your Store admin on a device, sessions from that device aren’t counted as online store sessions.**

### Why do we need Adaptive Authentication? {#Why-do-we-need-Adaptive-Authentication}

When session management and user authentication are not configured correctly, attackers may be able to gain access to users’ accounts by compromising passwords and assuming their identities. Many development frameworks offer tools for secure implementation of session management, but there are weaknesses in any of these solutions. By implementing adaptive authentication we can remove this hassle. Adaptive authentication provides an additional layer of multi-factor authentication security based on risk and access provided by security administrators.

### What is Adaptive Authentication? {#What-is-Adaptive-Authentication}

Adaptive authentication is a type of multi-factor authentication that is a process of selecting the right authentication factors depending on a user’s risk profile defined and tends to adapt the type of authorization factors.

Adaptive MFA authentication prompts for Multi-Authentication counting on the behavior, device IP, Geo-Location of the user which directly improves security level to the very best.

### Adaptive Authentication in Shopify {#Adaptive-Authentication-in-Shopify}

When a user decides to sign in to a store, the security component is increased by activating an authentication step or by creating real-time Multi-Factor Authentication automatically when improper authentication is found or by detecting fraud. The authentication risk is checked without users being aware of it and multi-factor authentication (MFA) is applied only if the associated risk is high.

![adaptive-authentication](/blog/assets/2023/adaptive-authentication.webp)

Adaptive authentication adapts to the risk level and presents an appropriate level of authentication regardless of your corporate risk levels. Adaptive Authentication solutions can strengthen the authentication methods based on a wide variety of factors including:

- Source IP address
- Time of day
- Geo-location (physical location)
- Entity type (device type)
- Content-Based

Each time a user tries to Sign in to the Store, the request is evaluated and assigned a risk score. Depending on the risk score, the user may be required to provide additional authentication factors to prove the identity. For example, if a user tries to access Store via multiple devices, they may be asked to sign out from other devices. If the user tries to log in from a geographical location other than their office, they may have to verify their identity by answering a security question.

### Session Management and Adaptive Authentication Use Cases {#Session-Management-and-Adaptive-Authentication}

**Terminate user session and restrict Customer to one login at a time**

You are using Shopify to sell streaming videos that can only be accessed after purchasing the subscription. Suppose a shopper login to the store using his username and password and purchase products from the store. Consider a scenario where the user shares his account credentials with their friends so that they can access the store. Being a store owner you would like to discourage people from sharing their login credentials and prevent multiple people from using the same login credential at the same time to access the same account. You would like to restrict customer account to only being able to log in from one device at a time.

Assume the customer is already logged in from one device. When some other user tries to log in using the same credentials from another device then you would like to do one of the following:

- Either the App will prompt to log out from the first device and the app will not allow login from the second device until the user successfully logs out from the first device.

- The app will terminate the session on the first device without indicating anything to the user and will log the user in from the second device by creating a new session

You can use the miniOrange app on the Shopify store for restricting the number of users that are allowed to access the store using the same account credentials and at the same time.

In practice it will look like this: When ‘Device A’ login to the store, a session is established, and if ‘Device B’ calls the login function and log in using the same credentials as that of ‘Device A’ then this will revoke all sessions and invalidate ‘Device A’ and will log the user in from ‘Device B’ with a different session.

&nbsp;

**App that locks down the account to one location at a time**

You are an owner of a Shopify store where you sell car accessories.

Customers from all over the world are ordering the products from your store but you are able to ship the products only to some countries. You don’t want customers from other countries to access your Shopify store as you can’t deliver over there.

![location-restriction](/blog/assets/2023/location-restriction.webp)

You can use location-based adaptive restriction, then the admin will select the list of countries from where they don’t want the end-users to login. during the login process the user’s geolocation, IP address, latitude, longitude will be checked against the list of locations selected by the administrator, and based on that the access can be granted or denied.

&nbsp;

**App that restricts access to several devices for a single account**

Suppose you own a Shopify store where you provide a streaming service that offers a wide variety of TV shows, movies, anime, documentaries, etc. to the end-users on a subscription basis. A user logs in to the store and purchases a plan and shares his account credentials with some of his friends so that they can access the store without purchasing any plan. However, you have to take action against that customer asking them not to share their login info with friends, which is a challenging customer service task.

In this scenario, you would like to restrict the customer account to be able to log in from one device, or several devices depending upon the plan he has purchased. You want to discourage customers from sharing their accounts by preventing multiple people from accessing the content from the same account at the same time.

![device-restriction](/blog/assets/2023/device-restriction.webp)

The administrator can ask the end-user to add a fixed number of trusted devices from where they can access their account. If the end-user tries to log in to the store from the trusted/registered device then access will be provided to them but if they try to login using the unregistered device then access won’t be provided to them.

&nbsp;

**Limit Number of Sessions / Purchases for Single Customer or household**

Consider a scenario where you own a Shopify store to sell branded products such as T-shirts, pants, caps, etc. to any user residing in any country. You are offering to free delivery on the first purchase. But the customers are ordering the product in a single household from multiple accounts so that they don’t have to pay for the delivery cost.

Suppose a customer uses 3 different accounts and 3 different sessions to order the product so that he/she doesn’t have to pay delivery costs. If the customer is connected to the same network then the IP address will be the same for every device on that network. You can use our app that will allow you to limit the connections to the store by using IP- restriction. The admin can restrict the user from accessing the store by adding that IP address to the list of blocked IPs.

![ip-restriction](/blog/assets/2023/ip-restriction.webp)

Any attempt to connect to your store will be blocked without being allowed to even present a username and password unless the connection was initiated from the new IP address. You can purchase our additional feature “Block access from VPN” to restrict the customer if they are using a VPN to disguise their IP address and login into their account.


Shopify Case studies for User session management and adaptive authentication. Restrict Multiple Login by terminating existing session of users in Store.

Shopify User Session Management


Cloud technology is undeniably considered paramount everywhere in the tech market. The rationale behind this is the emerging growth of Cloud technology in multiple businesses and enterprises to manage Data / Services which helps them to streamline their organizational process. G Suite is one of the most favored user-friendly Cloud technology, which is easily accessible from any device or location, irrational to organizational access parameters. G Suite continuously strives to supply additional features uniformly for the convenience of users. But still, there are a few aspects in G Suite that can’t be easily handled around access control and device management, due to the frontline feature that Google always promises of “anytime, anywhere and with any device”.

Easy cloud access to G Suite also brings up a set of challenges associated with security concerns to stop your data from being accessed by unauthorized users protecting it from various sorts of cyber threats. Maintaining the safety of such broad-driven cloud applications (Gmail, Google Drive) is one of the challenges within the modernized world. Here IP restriction for G Suite comes within the frame and is considered one of the proven solutions for handling these sorts of use cases.

To get specific inference regarding what **G suite IP restriction** is and the way it works we’d like to urge clear about a few basic aspects:-

- **What is IP restriction for G Suite?**
- **Why does your organization need IP restriction for G Suite?**
- **Why use miniOrange to protect your G Suite Data?**

### What is IP Restriction for G Suite? {#what-is-ip-restriction-for-gsuite}

IP Restriction termed as Internet Protocol Restriction allows admin or organization owners to restrict access to their business data to respective users and employees only through the specified and registered IP addresses. Allowing or restricting user access is often achieved with a separated IP as well as a variety of IP addresses. The IP restrictions are often set of different levels and combinations like defined IP ranges or individual IP addresses. Enabling IP restriction for G Suite ensures that your important data can’t be accessed at an unsecured public place or through an unregistered IP address.

Considering a real-time example, in a corporation you being an admin have whitelisted your employee’s device’s [Mobiles, PC’s] IP addresses and accordingly permitted access to your organization data. Now suppose if an employee is using the whitelisted device in an organization’s premises i.e he can easily access data and work around it accordingly. For a short time, if he tries to access data from his device being home, he won’t be allowed to access data as his device isn’t whitelisted by admin and secondly, he’s not operating the device from the required location he’s alleged to be.

IP restriction is enabled for various security purposes like reducing redundancy, bandwidth issues, and handling control of websites with efficient recovery. If a user tries to log in outside the required range, it’ll throw an error and a specific employee/ user won’t be unable to login and access the info. This feature is employed in various organizations within the Finance industry, Logistics, E-Commerce industry, Automobile segment, Manufacturing sector, IT industry, Educational sector, and Healthcare sector (KPOs).

### Why does your organization need IP restriction for G Suite? {#why-does-your-organization-need-ip-restriction-for-gsuite?}

Startups, mid-level organizations, and enormous enterprises are shifting over advanced cloud services to streamline their processing. G Suite, one of the foremost used cloud technologies, offers piles of services like Emailing, Google Calendar, Document – Presentation, file sharing, video apps, etc in a single package. As Google suite provides multiple offerings to numerous people directly, G Suite must cope up with multidimensional cloud computing security challenges. Although Google as a brand keeps no stone unturned to keep their users’ data safe with robust security protection, it still becomes difficult to cope up with distinct cyber threats within the cyber world.

Therefore, multiple cloud security companies came with the feature of IP restriction for G Suite. It enables the admin to shortlist IP addresses or a specific range of addresses, which then lets users transfer data or do further services from those registered IPs only. This IP restriction method indirectly prevents spoofing through manual defining of  IP ranges. Overall, there exist two ways of enabling IP restriction for Google Suite, One through a manual process or third-party cloud Security vendor.

### Why use miniOrange to protect your G Suite Data? {#why-use-miniOrange-to-protect-your-gsuite-data?}

Enabling IP restriction for G Suite manually demands a high-versed technical person to handle the utilization case. If the person lacks technical knowledge and performs something wrong then your G Suite cloud security risk level might increase unexpectedly. So here we need an advanced cloud security system that will overcome these issues and provide a top-notch security solution to your G suite organizational data.

Here miniOrange comes in and offers all-in-one protection measures to the businesses using G Suite. It also renders g suite security with IP restriction standards to supply high-level security to your organizational G Suite data. To implement **[IP restriction for G Suite](https://www.miniorange.com/configure-google-workspace-ip-restriction)** for your organization or business is a simple walk with miniOrange. You don’t have to put in extra effort as an enterprise to disturb the implementation of Google account security during a business.

miniOrange takes full control and visibility of organizational data, which is stored on Google. It also allows IT administrators to analyze the employee’s behavior towards enterprise data. On detection of a possible breach, it instantly sends an alert email message to notify higher business authorities. miniOrange also renders the program to enforce access control standards at the macro level on the idea of the device, IP address, time, browser, geolocation, etc.

You can follow the steps given here to set up IP restrictions and other **[Adaptive MFA](https://www.miniorange.com/products/adaptive-multi-factor-authentication-mfa)** methods for your applications. 

![G Suite IP restrictions](/blog/assets/2023/gsuite-features.webp)

**G Suite Automated Security Measures provided by miniOrange:**

Following listed are security measures provided by miniOrange,

**1. Access Control** : Access control specifies data control policies on the idea of location, device, IP address, and other means through which  G Suite content is often accessed. It imposes conditional policies on customer’s Google for business accounts and creates a virtual secure environment.

- [IP Restriction](https://www.miniorange.com/configure-google-workspace-ip-restriction): Restricts user access from unknown IP addresses to ensure corporate data is accessible only through IPs defined by the IT admin.
- [Geo (Location) Restriction](https://www.miniorange.com/configure-google-workspace-location-restriction#:~:text=On%20the%20Add%20Policy%20tab,the%20UP%20%26%20DOWN%20navigation%20keys.): Here a selected geographical area is assigned, to stop corporate data from being accessed from unauthorized remote locations.
- [Time Restriction](https://www.miniorange.com/configure-google-workspace-time-restriction): In time restriction, you as a corporation can fix specific timings, so hereafter any employee can access and work around corporate data within a specified time-frame. (e.g working hours)
- Browser Restriction: With miniOrange you’ll  register a specific browser, so hereafter an organizational employee can access corporate data as long as he’s using the required registered browser
- [Device Restriction](https://www.miniorange.com/configure-google-workspace-device-restriction): In Device Restriction user’s relatable devices like his mobile or Pc are going to be registered, if a specific user tries to log into the enterprise portal through unregistered or unknown devices he won’t be allowed to access

**2. DLP Policy**: Data loss prevention standard policy is appended by miniOrange during this consolidated Google Security software. These policies make sure that employees won’t send confidential business information outside the business network. Whenever the IP restriction for G Suite solution detects the occurrence of such an incident, it immediately blocks the user access and sends an alert mail to the business authority.
Aside from this, many other subsequent security measures are provided by miniOrange.

**Specific G-Suite security features provided by miniOrange:**

- Administrators can prefer to apply rules to specific individuals, groups, or the whole organization differently.
- Rules are often set during a hierarchy, allowing flexible management.
- Predefined IP locations white list where a user is allowed to access from.
- No firewall or installations are required.
- Easy policy settings.

### Conclusion {#conclusion}

Being a neighborhood of the high-versed cyber world, it’s an important need of enterprises to adopt a high-versed Security Solution for G Suite. To manage advanced security for the G suite with other multiple activities becomes a daunting task for an organization and IT admins. Though it’d be difficult to manage security norms it’s the necessity of the time considering trending cyber-attacks. So it’s better to approach security-as-a-service providers. There are few cloud security providers, which give top-notch security services. But before choosing any cloud Security Service provider ensure they did it confidentially, with the simplest technical support at a budgeted price. Accordingly, I feel miniOrange here fits within the best considering these points. You can schedule a free demo with them to ascertain how IP restriction for G Suite works and how it can add an extra edge to your organizational security.

### Further Reading {#further-reading}

- [What is IP Restriction?](https://www.miniorange.com/iam/solutions/ip-restriction#:~:text=IP%20Restriction%20Solution%20allows%20administrators,and%20registered%20IP%20addresses%20range.)
- [Google Workspace Multifactor Authentication](https://www.miniorange.com/google-apps-two-factor-authentication-(2fa))
- [Adaptive Authentication ](https://www.miniorange.com/products/adaptive-multi-factor-authentication-mfa)
- [Risk-based Authentication (RBA)](https://www.miniorange.com/iam/solutions/risk-based-authentication-rba)

IP Restriction for G Suite allows secure login and restricts unauthorized access based on IP address, geolocation, time, and the device.

Shopify User Session Management

What is G Suite IP Restriction? Enable IP Restriction for G Suite