Guacamole 1.6 Integration

Design

The SessionGuard Guacamole extension is deliberately not an authentication provider in the identity sense. PocketID/header authentication stays responsible for user identity.

The extension subclasses Guacamole's authentication-provider extension point only to decorate the authenticated UserContext with a TokenInjectingUserContext. At connection time it sends the current Guacamole username plus connection identity to the SessionGuard broker and injects returned tokens.

This avoids:

writing dynamic hostnames directly into the Guacamole PostgreSQL database;
reimplementing PocketID authentication in SessionGuard;
opening a management connection from Master to RDS hosts.

Build

cd guacamole-extension
mvn -DskipTests package

Or use deploy/guacamole/Dockerfile.guacamole, which builds the JAR and copies it to the stock Guacamole extension directory.

Required Guacamole environment

SESSIONGUARD_MASTER_URL: http://sessionguard-master:8080
SESSIONGUARD_BROKER_API_KEY: ${SESSIONGUARD_BROKER_API_KEY}
SESSIONGUARD_BROKER_TIMEOUT_MS: "2500"

Use the same broker API key configured on the SessionGuard Master. The URL should preferably be an internal network URL, not the public Internet endpoint.

Desktop connection

Configure the Guacamole RDP hostname as:

${SESSIONGUARD_HOST}

The extension resolves the target host at connection time.

RemoteApp

Use:

hostname:        ${SESSIONGUARD_HOST}
remote-app:      ${SESSIONGUARD_REMOTE_APP}
remote-app-dir:  ${SESSIONGUARD_REMOTE_APP_DIR}
remote-app-args: ${SESSIONGUARD_REMOTE_APP_ARGS}

Create a matching Published Resource in SessionGuard by Guacamole connection ID or name.

Header-auth security boundary

Your Guacamole configuration uses a trusted header such as X-Guacamole-User. That is safe only if untrusted requests cannot reach Guacamole directly with an attacker-controlled copy of that header.

Recommended topology:

Internet
   |
Traefik + forward-auth/header scrubber
   |
dedicated trusted Guacamole proxy network
   |
Guacamole
   +--- private backend ---> guacd
   +--- private backend ---> PostgreSQL
   +--- private control ---> SessionGuard Master

Do not rely solely on the fact that the public Traefik router strips inbound identity headers if arbitrary unrelated containers can directly connect to Guacamole's port on a shared Docker network.

Integration with the supplied compose

Your existing PocketID → traefik-forward-auth → Guacamole chain can remain unchanged. The required additions are:

build Guacamole using deploy/guacamole/Dockerfile.guacamole;
add the three SESSIONGUARD_* variables above;
give Guacamole private reachability to the SessionGuard Master;
add SessionGuard Published Resources matching your Guacamole connections;
replace fixed RDP hostnames in brokered connections with ${SESSIONGUARD_HOST}.

deploy/guacamole/docker-compose.sessionguard.example.yml provides a focused example rather than replacing your complete existing stack.

Failure behavior

If the SessionGuard broker is unavailable, the extension fails the brokered connection instead of choosing an arbitrary backend. This is intentional where reconnect affinity/profile concurrency matters. Existing already-established Guacamole/RDP sessions are unaffected.

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