SharePoint 2010 / 2013 web browser session timeout

Question

1) What settings govern how long a user is authenticated in SharePoint before they need to enter their credentials again in the browser ?
2) How to check what these default session timeouts are and how to change them ?
Thanks,
Mario

Answer 1

Thanks Inderjeet and Lakshmanan for the links.
I did some more research, and here are my findings regarding SharePoint authentication cookies:  (We are using claims with Windows NTLM authentication in SharePoint 2010)
Per the white paper at
http://download.microsoft.com/download/9/F/6/9F69FEBA-614B-483F-9CF2-60225D75E81E/persistent-cookies-whitepaper.docx : "SharePoint sites create persistent cookies with a default time-out value of 10 hours for sites that use Windows claims or forms-based
authentication claims"
I verified this by running the following PowerShell command:
Get-SPSecurityTokenServiceConfig | select WindowsTokenLifetime
which returned 10:00:00 (i.e. 10 hours) and matches the default cookie timeout in the white paper.
However, in my testing, I found that once I logged in, I was able to access the site without re-entering my credentials even after 10 hours, so I'm not sure what exactly controls the session timeout.
Also, the white paper mentions that by default SharePoint uses persistent authentication cookies that are saved to disk. However, even after deleting all cookies from my browser, I am still able to access the site without entering credentials. (I only need
to re-enter credentials once I close the browser and reopen the SharePoint site in the browser again) . The only cookies I see are related to '/_vti_bin/Discovery.asmx' and I don't think that these are the authentication cookies.
To summarize - my test results were not consistent with the default timeout of 10 hours, and I was unable to find the SharePoint authentication cookie. Interested to hear if anyone has any thoughts on this.
Thanks,
Mario