On 10/5/10 4:44 AM, Mike Müller wrote:
> Hi
> 
> As of the discussion in [1] I like to start a new discussion
> about whether to disable or enable Basic Auth per default.
> The initial reason to disable it, were the problems appeared
> in the Sling Explorer after logging in under /system/console
> with Basic Auth (SLING-1765 [2]).
To boil it down, the problem identified in SLING-1765 is that if a user
logs into the OSGi web console and then visits any Sling application
(including, but not limited to, the Sling Explorer), the user is still
logged in.

There are three things which come to my mind about this:
1) The problem is that the Felix web console uses Basic Auth, not that
Sling supports preemptive Basic Auth. Therefore, we should be changing
the web console, not Sling's default configuration.

2) Couldn't you work around this by removing the
org.apache.sling.extensions.webconsolesecurityprovider bundle and making
it so that the Jackrabbit and Felix admin passwords weren't the same?

3) Aren't we talking about a relatively small number of advanced users?
The OSGi web console doesn't have any kind of RBAC, so I can't imagine
we're talking about end users or even normal content editors being
impacted here. If someone can be trusted to muck around with the OSGi
web console, they should be able to understand how to resolve the
scenario described.

> 
> With Basic Auth on we've got serveral issues in the browsers:
> - Some browsers pass credentials even on parent paths 
> where  credentials should not be sent. 
> - Logout is mostly a problem
> 
> With other clients than browsers these issues doesn't exist.
> 
> I think we agree on the fact that it would be better/safer
> to disable Basic Auth if there would not be a backward
> compatibility issue with it. 
I don't agree with this at all. IMHO, Basic Auth is preferable for
command-line tools, scripts, and the like.

> 
> What crossed my mind is, that it would be very pratical to
> have something like a conf file where you can overwrite 
> defaults from components as you wish. The conf file should 
> be placed into the Sling launchpad which reads the properties
> and overwrites the defaults. But that's a little bit off topic here,
> but would solve the problem that someone has to patch
> the source only because of another default value...
See http://markmail.org/message/pvria2dxnifmllmu. I've been short on
time and trying to get the Emma integration done, but as soon as that's
finished, I can start integrating the ConfigAdmin/Launchpad code.

Without this support, you can pretty easily do something similar with a
component like this: http://gist.github.com/611550

Justin

> 
> [1] http://markmail.org/thread/nmcjhvq46ihok7p2
> [2] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SLING-1765
> 
> best regards
> mike

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