Re: libcurl and nginx persistent auth behavior

Daniel Stenberg via curl-library <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.comp.web.curl.library
Message-ID <[email protected]>
On Sat, 31 May 2025, Luke Palmer via curl-library wrote:

> To put this another way, libcurl assumes persistent authentication is
> present when multiplexing, and nginx does not natively implement persistent
> authentication at all.

Thinking about it, I suspect nginx is right on this. Since different streams 
can access different resources and are mostly independent of each other, it 
does not seem proper to assume they are automatically authenticated just 
because they share a connection.

Unfortunately, Negotiate authentication is a horrible mess when it comes to 
specification and interoperability so there is simply no good way to come to a 
definite conclusion.

The most sensible for servers would probably be to refuse HTTP/2 for Negotiate 
the same way they refuse NTLM for HTTP/2, but we're not in the position to 
make such demands now. We have to work with what exists.

> This seems tricky to get right, but it's also a shame to have the most 
> popular client not be compatible with the most popular server.

Since this is an entirely new logic flow and requirement for HTTP auth and 
only for HTTP/2 and HTTP/3, it is going to require some fiddling to get right 
I'm sure.

-- 

  / daniel.haxx.se || https://rock-solid.curl.dev
-- 
Unsubscribe: https://lists.haxx.se/mailman/listinfo/curl-library
Etiquette:   https://curl.se/mail/etiquette.html
lmpx.com only provides a reader for public news (NNTP) servers. It is not affiliated with the servers or forums shown here and is not responsible for the content of articles, which is written by their respective authors.