Creating an index.do is one option. If it is not marked as secure, sslextI actually have a more important concern about doing this -- exposing information to people who can listen in on the packets that go back and forth.
will write an absolute URL back to http:// for it. Many Struts users
advocate that all requests should be served by Actions, even if the action
merely forwards to a JSP.
Many people would like, for example, to have the login form be secure so that your password is not sent across the wire encrypted, but then go back to http for the rest of the session for the better performance. The seemingly ideal solution is to have the destination of the login submit require SSL, and then switch back. Using a <user-transport-guarantee> security constraint, you can even let the container worry about the http->https transition for you. Or, you can use things like SSLext that is nicely integrated into Struts.
However, the servlet spec offers no help in switching back to http, because it is not a recommended practice. Why? Consider the fact that you now trust subsequent transactions from the same user, and are typically using the session that was established earlier (whether the session was originally created in http or https turns out not to matter). But the session id is no longer encrypted (it's either in a cookie or in rewritten URLs), so it can be easily forged by anyone with a network snooper between you and the server. How do you guarantee that an after-login request on that session is not being sent by someone who is forging the session id because they snooped it?
I'm a conservative on security issues -- if I have an app that needs SSL sometimes, I arrange things to never accept a non-SSL request on the same session again, once I've switched to SSL (easy to do with a Filter, for example). If you're concerned enough to protect the password, you should be concerned enough to pay the CPU overhead for SSL the remainder of the session. Otherwise, it's likely that encrypting the login form will just give you a false sense of security.
CraigI think you can also use the secure attribute in the sslext tags to indicate whether the target of the link or form should be accessed securely. In this case, you would add secure="false" to the sslext:link tag that goes back to /index.jsp.
-Max
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