W3C home > Mailing lists > Public > ietf-http-wg@w3.org > October to December 2011

Re: best status code for bad auth method

From: Adrien de Croy <adrien@qbik.com>
Date: Fri, 09 Dec 2011 20:54:05 +1300
Message-ID: <4EE1BE9D.3000404@qbik.com>
To: Daniel Stenberg <daniel@haxx.se>
CC: HTTP Working Group <ietf-http-wg@w3.org>

my gut tells me responding with a 407 is more likely to result in 
request looping.

403 shuts it down (or should).

browser behaviour when you send a 407 back when a client considers auth 
should be complete, results in the browser popping a login dialog.

But since there are few browsers, and I'm pretty sure they all honour 
the advertised methods, we won't see this - just headless agents.

Maybe we need a new status code...


On 9/12/2011 8:47 p.m., Daniel Stenberg wrote:
> On Fri, 9 Dec 2011, Adrien de Croy wrote:
>
>> 407 also implicitly says try again, whereas 403 says don't... so I'm 
>> leaning towards the 403.
>>
>> I guess the number of web browsers this will affect is about 0... so 
>> only un-manned applications will see this
>
> Surely 407 is already in wide use for this? I would expect many 
> proxies to just not care about non-supported auth methods and since it 
> didn't find a correct auth header, it would respond with a 407.
>
> And in regards to it saying the client should try again, I consider it 
> similar to sending an auth header with bad credentials compared to no 
> credentials. The client must know what it did before when it gets a 
> 407 back, and then change it accordingly before it tries again.
>

-- 
Adrien de Croy - WinGate Proxy Server - http://www.wingate.com
Received on Friday, 9 December 2011 07:54:38 UTC

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.4.0 : Thursday, 2 February 2023 18:43:26 UTC