Limit guest's active session life span

---
title: Limit guest's active session life span
description: Use the glide.guest.active.session.life\_span property to control the duration of an active guest's HTTP sessions.
locale: en-US
canonical_url: https://www.servicenow.com/docs/r/australia/platform-security/instance-security-hardening-settings/sc-limit-guests-active-session-life-span.html
release: australia
product: Instance Security Hardening Settings
classification: instance-security-hardening-settings
topic_type: reference
last_updated: "2026-09-10"
reading_time_minutes: 2
breadcrumb: [Session management, Hardening settings, Platform Security]
---

# Limit guest's active session life span

Use the **glide.guest.active.session.life\_span** property to control the duration of an active guest's HTTP sessions.

The **glide.guest.active.session.life\_span** property enforces a maximum lifespan on active guest HTTP sessions, regardless of the session activity. The configured value is in minutes. A value of zero disables the lifespan limit entirely, allowing sessions to persist indefinitely until the inactive timeout fires. Guest users are unauthenticated users who access the instance without logging in.

A larger maximum lifespan allows an attacker to persist a stolen session for longer, increasing the scope of a security incident.

Navigate to /sys\_properties\_list.do on the instance and verify that the **glide.guest.active.session.life\_span** property exists and is set to a value greater than 0 and less than or equal to 720 minutes.

## More information

<table id="table_ajc_b43_3kb"><thead><tr><th>

Attribute

</th><th>

Description

</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>

Configuration name

</td><td>

**glide.guest.active.session.life\_span**

</td></tr><tr><td>

Configuration type

</td><td>

System Properties \(/sys\_properties\_list.do\)

</td></tr><tr><td>

Data type

</td><td>

integer

</td></tr><tr><td>

Recommended value

</td><td>

720

</td></tr><tr><td>

Default value

</td><td>

0

</td></tr><tr><td>

Fallback value

</td><td>

0

</td></tr><tr><td>

Category

</td><td>

[Session management](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ServiceNow/ServiceNowDocs/australia/markdown/australia/platform-security/instance-security-hardening-settings/sc-session-management.md)

</td></tr><tr><td>

Security risk

</td><td>

-   Severity score: 4.2
-   CVSS score: Medium
-   Security risk details: A larger maximum lifespan allows an attacker to persist a stolen session for longer, increasing the scope of a security incident.

</td></tr><tr><td>

Functional impact

</td><td>

Guest HTTP sessions that exceed the configured lifespan are silently invalidated and reissued a new session ID. The guest user sees no error or logout screen, but any session-scoped state \(for example, in-progress form data, embedded portal widget context, or session-based rate limiting\) accumulated during that session is lost and starts fresh. Legitimate guest users on long-running but otherwise idle browser tabs require reloading the page after the configured interval elapses.

</td></tr><tr><td>

Dependencies and prerequisites

</td><td>

This control interacts with the **glide.guest.session\_timeout** property, which controls the guest idle-session timeout duration. The platform requires the active session maximum lifespan to be greater than or equal to the idle timeout. If the active session lifespan is configured to a value lower than the idle-session timeout, the platform automatically increases the effective lifespan to match the idle-session timeout and logs a warning message.

</td></tr></tbody>
</table>**Parent Topic:**[Session management](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ServiceNow/ServiceNowDocs/australia/markdown/australia/platform-security/instance-security-hardening-settings/sc-session-management.md)