(Bear with me as there are a lot of details; I'll try to be as clear as possible)
I've been setting up a simple application in tomcat 8.0 where some resources are protected but others aren't. I want to login using AJAX instead of FORM or BASIC so I don't have any login-config specified in my deployment descriptor (nor any security-roles defined). For testing, I have a custom form that sends login info asynchronously to an unprotected login service which calls login(). On the same page as the login form, I have a test button that makes an asynchronous request to a protected resource (using a @ServletSecurity annotation). As expected, before calling login (and thus login()) I get a 403, but after doing the login() I get a 200 and can see the response text. This all works fine in tomcat 8.0. However, when I try the application in tomcat 8.5, with the same server and application config, something different happens. I do the login and call the protected resource and get the 200 as before, but now every subsequent call to the protected resource returns a 403. I thought maybe there was something peculiar about this specific protected resource, but not the case, any protected resource works the first time, but not subsequent times. To confirm what is going on, I created an unprotected resource that provides auth info, and I can see after I login() it reports my username and my affiliated roles (using isUserInRole() for known role names). And I can refresh this info any number of times and it doesn't change. But as soon as I access a protected resource, twice, the unprotected auth info still shows my username, but now my roles are stripped. Thinking there is something wrong with login(), I change to using BASIC and run similar tests, never using the login() call, and everything works fine; notably, I can access a protected resource more than once. Strangely, what I also unexpectedly noticed is now that I have BASIC specified, when I do use login() things are working fine now even if I never get a BASIC prompt. So, I can access a protected resource more than once. I know this sounds like a weird state issue, but I've restarted web servers, browsers, deployed, undeployed, and redeployed apps dozens and dozens of time. And I even confirmed the 200 and subsequent 403 calls were exactly the same; notably, both had the same session cookie information. So, if this isn't a tomcat bug, which of course I'm very hesitant to imply, then maybe there is something that changed in the configuration that was optional before but maybe isn't now? Maybe I have to specify BASIC or FORM even if I never plan to use it? Any other suggestions? Thanks for reading. Robert
