17.10.2009, в 3:20, Ian Hickson написал(а):

I'm not really sure what else to say to be honest. Should I just leave it at cookies and nothing else? Really I just want to support Basic (and I guess Digest) authentication (primarily for over-TLS connections), so that sites that use Basic auth, like, say, porn sites, or the W3C, can also use it for their Web Socket connections. I could just limit it that way; would
that work?

Formally limiting support for Basic auth would be workable, I guess. Implementation of Digest authentication is already non-trivial enough for me to wish that we don't implement it at first.

Or perhaps authentication should be limited to cookies in v1 indeed.

If /code/, interpreted as ASCII, is "401", then let /mode/ be
_authenticate_. Otherwise, fail the Web Socket connection and
abort these steps.

407 (proxy authenticate) also likely needs to be supported.

Proxies wouldn't work with WebSockets in general.

Could you please elaborate? I thought there was a setup that could work
with most deployed HTTPS proxies - one could run WebSockets server on
port 443.

Oh, I see what you're saying. Proxy authentication of this nature is
covered by step 2 of the handshake algorithm, as part of "connect to that proxy and ask it to open a TCP/IP connection to the host given by / host/
and the port given by /port/". There's even an example showing auth
headers being sent to the proxy. By the time we get down to parsing the response, we're long past the point where we might be authenticating to a
proxy. Is that a problem?

Hmm, I actually don't know for sure. Step 2 only covers the case when the user agent is configured to use a proxy - but an organization may have a transparent proxy intercepting requests. But I do not know if such a proxy can practically request authentication by returning a 407 response (blurring the meaning of "transparent" a bit, but anyway).

I could add support for 407 here and just say
that you jump back to step 2 and include the authentication this time,
would that work?

If the answer to my above concern is yes, then it should work, as long as the text doesn't require double TLS handshake or something like that.

Some authentication schemes (e.g. NTLM) work on connection basis, so
I don't think that closing the connection right after receiving a
challenge can work with them.

Yeah, that's quite possible.

Is this something you plan to correct in the spec?

Is there much to correct? I don't understand what would need to change
here. Does NTLM not work with HTTP without pipelining?

You probably meant HTTP persistent connections here, not pipelining. Yes, since NTLM authentication works on connections and not individual requests, closing the connection after receiving a challenge will make it inoperable, as far as I know.

Or do you mean that
you would rather have authentication be a first-class primitive operation in Web Socket, instead of relying on the HTTP features? We could do that:
instead of faking an HTTP communication, we could have a header in the
handshake that means "after this, the client must send one more handshake consisting of an authentication token", and if the UA fails to send the
right extra bit, then fail. I think if we did this, we'd want to punt
until version 2, though.


Yes, I think that relying on HTTP specs to define authentication to Web Sockets takes the "fake HTTP handshake" concept too far.

- WBR, Alexey Proskuryakov

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