My web application has a login page that submits authentication credentials via an AJAX call. If the user enters the correct username and password, everything is fine, but if not, the following happens:
The web server determines that although the request included a well-formed Authorization header, the credentials in the header do not successfully authenticate.
The web server returns a 401 status code and includes one or more WWW-Authenticate headers listing the supported authentication types.
The browser detects that the response to my call on the XMLHttpRequest object is a 401 and the response includes WWW-Authenticate headers. It then pops up an authentication dialog asking, again, for the username and password.
This is all fine up until step 3. I don't want the dialog to pop up, I want want to handle the 401 response in my AJAX callback function. (For example, by displaying an error message on the login page.) I want the user to re-enter their username and password, of course, but I want them to see my friendly, reassuring login form, not the browser's ugly, default authentication dialog.
Incidentally, I have no control over the server, so having it return a custom status code (i.e., something other than a 401) is not an option.
Is there any way I can suppress the authentication dialog? In particular, can I suppress the Authentication Required dialog in Firefox 2 or later? Is there any way to suppress the Connect to [host] dialog in IE 6 and later?
Edit
Additional information from the author (Sept. 18):
I should add that the real problem with the browser's authentication dialog popping up is that it give insufficient information to the user.
The user has just entered a username and password via the form on the login page, he believes he has typed them both correctly, and he has clicked the submit button or hit enter. His expectation is that he will be taken to the next page or perhaps told that he has entered his information incorrectly and should try again. However, he is instead presented with an unexpected dialog box.
The dialog makes no acknowledgment of the fact he just did enter a username and password. It does not clearly state that there was a problem and that he should try again. Instead, the dialog box presents the user with cryptic information like "The site says: '[realm]'." Where [realm] is a short realm name that only a programmer could love.
Web broswer designers take note: no one would ask how to suppress the authentication dialog if the dialog itself were simply more user-friendly. The entire reason that I am doing a login form is that our product management team rightly considers the browsers' authentication dialogs to be awful.
I encountered the same issue here, and the backend engineer at my company implemented a behavior that is apparently considered a good practice : when a call to a URL returns a 401, if the client has set the header X-Requested-With: XMLHttpRequest, the server drops the www-authenticate header in its response.
The side effect is that the default authentication popup does not appear.
Make sure that your API call has the X-Requested-With header set to XMLHttpRequest. If so there is nothing to do except changing the server behavior according to this good practice...
The browser pops up a login prompt when both of the following conditions are met:
HTTP status is 401
WWW-Authenticate header is present in the response
If you can control the HTTP response, then you can remove the WWW-Authenticate header from the response, and the browser won't popup the login dialog.
If you can't control the response, you can setup a proxy to filter out the WWW-Authenticate header from the response.
As far as I know (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong), there is no way to prevent the login prompt once the browser receives the WWW-Authenticate header.
I don't think this is possible -- if you use the browser's HTTP client implementation, it will always pop up that dialog. Two hacks come to mind:
Maybe Flash handles this differently (I haven't tried yet), so having a flash movie make the request might help.
You can set up a 'proxie' for the service that you're accessing on your own server, and have it modify the authentication headers a bit, so that the browser doesn't recognise them.
I realize that this question and its answers are very old. But, I ended up here. Perhaps others will as well.
If you have access to the code for the web service that is returning the 401. Simply change the service to return a 403 (Forbidden) in this situation instead 401. The browser will not prompt for credentials in response to a 403. 403 is the correct code for an authenticated user that is not authorized for a specific resource. Which seems to be the situation of the OP.
From the IETF document on 403:
A server that receives valid credentials that are not adequate to
gain access ought to respond with the 403 (Forbidden) status code
In Mozilla you can achieve it with the following script when you create the XMLHttpRequest object:
xmlHttp=new XMLHttpRequest();
xmlHttp.mozBackgroundRequest = true;
xmlHttp.open("GET",URL,true,USERNAME,PASSWORD);
xmlHttp.send(null);
The 2nd line prevents the dialog box....
What server technology do you use and is there a particular product you use for authentication?
Since the browser is only doing its job, I believe you have to change things on the server side to not return a 401 status code. This could be done using custom authentication forms that simply return the form again when the authentication fails.
In Mozilla land, setting the mozBackgroundRequest parameter of XMLHttpRequest (docs) to true suppresses those dialogs and causes the requests to simply fail. However, I don't know how good cross-browser support is (including whether the the quality of the error info on those failed requests is very good across browsers.)
jan.vdbergh has the truth, if you can change the 401 on server side for another status code, the browser won't catch and paint the pop-up.
Another solution could be change the WWW-Authenticate header for another custom header. I dont't believe why the different browser can't support it, in a few versions of Firefox we can do the xhr request with mozBackgroundRequest, but in the other browsers?? here, there is an interesting link with this issue in Chromium.
I have this same issue with MVC 5 and VPN where whenever we are outside the DMZ using the VPN, we find ourselves having to answer this browser message. Using .net I simply handle the routing of the error using
<customErrors defaultRedirect="~/Error" >
<error statusCode="401" redirect="~/Index"/>
</customErrors>
thus far it has worked because the Index action under the home controller validates the user. The view in this action, if logon is unsuccessful, has login controls that I use to log the user in using using LDAP query passed into Directory Services:
DirectoryEntry entry = new DirectoryEntry("LDAP://OurDomain");
DirectorySearcher Dsearch = new DirectorySearcher(entry);
Dsearch.Filter = "(SAMAccountName=" + UserID + ")";
Dsearch.PropertiesToLoad.Add("cn");
While this has worked fine thus far, and I must let you know that I am still testing it and the above code has had no reason to run so it's subject to removal... testing currently includes trying to discover a case where the second set of code is of any more use. Again, this is a work in progress, but since it could be of some assistance or jog your brain for some ideas, I decided to add it now... I will update it with the final results once all testing is done.
I'm using Node, Express & Passport and was struggling with the same issue. I got it to work by explicitly setting the www-authenticate header to an empty string. In my case, it looked like this:
(err, req, res, next) => {
if (err) {
res._headers['www-authenticate'] = ''
return res.json(err)
}
}
I hope that helps someone!
I recently encountered the similar situation while developing a web app for Samsung Tizen Smart TV. It was required to scan the complete local network but few IP addresses were returning "401 Unauthorized" response with "www-authenticate" header attached. It was popping up a browser authentication pop requiring user to enter "Username" & "Password" because of "Basic" authentication type (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Authentication).
To get rid from this, the simple thing which worked for me is setting credentials: 'omit' for Fetc Api Call (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Fetch_API/Using_Fetch). Official documentation says that:
To instead ensure browsers don’t include credentials in the request, use credentials: 'omit'
fetch('https://example.com', {
credentials: 'omit'
})
For those unsing C# here's ActionAttribute that returns 400 instead of 401, and 'swallows' Basic auth dialog.
public class NoBasicAuthDialogAuthorizeAttribute : AuthorizeAttribute
{
protected override void HandleUnauthorizedRequest(AuthorizationContext filterContext)
{
base.HandleUnauthorizedRequest(filterContext);
filterContext.Result = new HttpStatusCodeResult(400);
}
}
use like following:
[NoBasicAuthDialogAuthorize(Roles = "A-Team")]
public ActionResult CarType()
{
// your code goes here
}
Hope this saves you some time.
Here is a screenshot of the application :
1: We can see Set Cookie here
2: We can see Cookie under response here
3: Doesn't appear here
Tried to find a lot of resources read things about CORS as well but still haven't been able to solve this issue.
Update :
After much discussions with my colleagues this issue couldn't be resolved, thus we have decided to change the code structure and the working of the application to go around this issue.
What you need to do is the endpoint http://4bf9e0a0.ngrok.io/ that generates the token cookie needs to write the cookie on your behalf for your domain http://samldemo.builtapp.io.
Ok in your saml auth service/ method on ngrok.io , when you write the cookie, set the domain similar to this:
setCookie('authtoken', 'bltd435345353453', {
domain: 'samldemo.builtapp.io', // The domain you to read the cookie on
...
...
...
});
Some Auth/Token providers will provide an API to configure how the the token created and configured, for example setting up your domain, etc. This is only possible server side.
Aloha! Today, I'm trying to add custom headers to each request to my backend.
Playing with my DS.RESTAdapter, I already tried:
The 3 headers: solutions suggested in the official guide.
The 2 ajax: approaches proposed around there.
And 2 jQuery workarounds (based on $.ajaxPrefilter and $.ajaxSetup) that I found there.
Until now, my only result was this very obscure "Adapter operation failed" error:
{
details: "",
status: 0,
title: "The backend responded with an error"
}
I know that:
My backend behaves well and returns a 200 status (I tested sending the request via cURL).
Strangely, removing my adapter's host setting allows the request to be sent, but obviously at the wrong URL.
My problem is not a CSP issue as I'm currently running both backend & frontend locally.
According to my debugging and to my Network Inspector tab, the AJAX request is just never sent (XHR.readyStatus is stuck at 0).
Has somebody already faced this?
Any help would be really lovely!
Ember 1.13.11
Ember Data 1.13.15
jQuery 1.11.3
EDIT: Magic minimal app reproducing the bug is out here!
Hope you'll enjoy it! And because I love you so much, I also offered a demo API endpoint on my server. Details in the FM!
BONUS! Do you know what is the coolest thing to put in a clipboard?
git clone https://github.com/imbrou/ember-data-headers-demo.git
Yeeeeeeha! (-:
Usually "Adapter operation failed" error occurs because your application is having problems connecting to the backend, usually DS.RESTAdapter is not correctly setup, make sure your host and namespace are correct.
Example:
export default DS.RESTAdapter.extend({
host: 'http://193.137.170.210:8080',
namespace: '/api'
});
Solved !
My backend was not sending the correct CORS headers.
The tricky thing is that for an unknown reason, my version of Firefox (Developer Edition...) didn't display the failing OPTIONS request in my Network Inspector at the point of my debugging. I thus had no debugging information at all there.
I could only observe the failing preflight using... Wireshark !
It may have been a bug solved in a Christmas update, as I can't reproduce it today. Too bad...
Anyway, in desperation, I linked 3 screenshots:
No-preflight example: no backend security (no "authorization" token).
Working example: the "authorization" header is requested by client, and allowed by server in the response during the preflight.
Failing example: the "authorization" header is requested by the client, BUT not allowed by the server.
Hope it helps, thanks #Vítor for your support !
I am trying to load info from the uber API using javascript on a web page.
Well, basically I am playing with this tutorial, but I am getting Access-Control-Allow-Origin errors.
I have my CLIENT ID and SERVER TOKEN, and I left most of the other options blanked.
I tried to host it in the localhost and filled http://localhost:8000 in the ORIGIN URI but with no luck.
For the page https://kylelam.github.io/final-section/, I tried filled in https://*, https://kylelam.github.io, and https://kylelam.github.io/*, with combination of with and without dataType: 'jsonp', but I am still having trouble figuring out what went wrong.
Try this in meantime as workaround CORS issue
http://crossorigin.me/
Unfortunately, port numbers for localhost will not correctly show up in the Access-Control-Allow-Origin header, even after setting the Origin URI field for your app. This is a known issue that we hope to fix soon.
I'm trying to use jquery.couch.js to do couch operations in my ember.js app, but I'm having cors problems, and I have no clue what a good solution is.
It seems to me that couch running on port 5984 would make it basically unusable? Why do requests to different ports cause cors problems? And how on earth do OTHER people end up getting couch to work? I'm immensely confused, and not sure how to proceed.
My couch instance returns this from curl:
{"couchdb":"Welcome","version":"1.2.0"}
The code I'm unsuccessfully trying to run is this:
$.couch.urlPrefix = "http://127.0.0.1:5984";
$.couch.login({
name: 'name',
password: 'secret'
});
I've modifed the urlPrefix part several times to things like localhost and removing the http:// for both versions.
The error it's throwing:
XMLHttpRequest cannot load http://127.0.0.1:5984/_session. Origin http://localhost is not allowed by Access-Control-Allow-Origin.
Help me! I humbly recognize my noobiness for saying this, but how is couchdb even useful if this is built right into the basic functionality?
Oh and I'm including jquery.couch.js like this:
<script src="http://localhost:5984/_utils/script/jquery.couch.js"></script>
Using this version of jquery:
jQuery JavaScript Library v1.10.2
and using jquery migrate because of previous issues:
<script src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-migrate-1.2.1.js"></script>
Edit
I just now tried to add crossDomain: true, xhrFields: {withCredentials: true} to my login call, to no avail. Exact same error message. I'm clearly missing a core concept.
The message you are seeing is referring to the server, not the client. Changes made to the client's call will not, as you reported, change the result.
In CouchDB 1.4 specifically, CORS support must be explicitly enabled and an origins declaration must be made. That said, depending on how you are using your CouchDB instance there are two ways to enable it:
Change the setting in your local.ini directly and restart your instance, see here for more info: http://wiki.apache.org/couchdb/CORS
In the case you have futon available, go to Settings and find the setting there and enable it, in this case no restart is needed.
Update
It seems that the CORS section is not always existent by default, in this case just add it yourself.
Hope it helps.
For those who are using Cookie authentication (not password authentication) and are reusing the cookie in the Ajax request returned by the CouchDB server, you still need to do this in your $.ajax() requests to CouchDB:
xhrFields: {withCredentials: true},
Which, means you have to open the jquery.couch.js file that you sourced from the couch server and manually insert that option into the javascript.
CORS didn't work for me without both doing this on the client side and setting "credentials=true" on the server side.
The original jquery.couch.js as it is written right now doesn't support the client side sending Cookies with CORS, so you have to do it yourself until someone opens a ticket to get this fixed.