On Thu, 2005-12-08 at 08:33 -0600, Kasturi Narayanan wrote:
> And also as the name suggests it is a Proxy-Authorization and it needs to be
> consumed by a proxy before forwarding it to a UAS. So one of the proxies has
> to consume it. Ideally that will be proxy which challenged the user for that
> Realm. 

There is no reason that a proxy *needs* to consume a Proxy-Authorization
header.  Like all authorization headers, it is additive -- adding
authorization headers to a request can only increase the number of SIP
agents that are willing to process it.

The whole concept of "consuming" authorization headers (or any other
header) is a Bad Idea and should never be done.

> But if the Proxy is transaction stateful, it will be able to detect that it
> is a spiraled request and if it had already authorized it based on the
> previous info it can always skip it. 

That depends on the sort of transaction-stateful the proxy implements.
Some proxies (e.g., sipX) are stateful in regard to a request and its
corresponding response, but they do not associate a request and a
spiraled later leg of the request.

There is also the failure mode where two different proxies in a chain
authenticate against the same realm.  If the first proxy "consumes" all
Proxy-Authorization headers for that realm, the second proxy will
*never* pass the request because the UA can never get a Proxy-
Authorization for that realm to it.

Dale


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