Bug 446949

Summary: wget doesn't send Authentication header
Product: [Fedora] Fedora Reporter: Ignacio Nin <ignacio.nin>
Component: wgetAssignee: Karsten Hopp <karsten>
Status: CLOSED NOTABUG QA Contact: Fedora Extras Quality Assurance <extras-qa>
Severity: medium Docs Contact:
Priority: low    
Version: 9CC: maligree, micah
Target Milestone: ---   
Target Release: ---   
Hardware: i386   
OS: Linux   
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version: Doc Type: Bug Fix
Doc Text:
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Clone Of: Environment:
Last Closed: 2008-11-12 19:07:33 UTC Type: ---
Regression: --- Mount Type: ---
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Verified Versions: Category: ---
oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
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Description Ignacio Nin 2008-05-16 18:44:22 UTC 
Description of problem:

wget-1.11.1-1.fc9.i386 seems to ignore --http-user and --http-password 
command-line parameters, not sending Authentication HTTP header.


Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
1.11.1-1


How reproducible:
Two different i386 hosts tested, exactly same results.


Steps to Reproduce:
1. Just use wget --http-user=<user> --http-password=<password> to localhost on 
some port you listen with nc (error is not restricted to localhost anyway). 
Authentication header won't arrive.
  
Actual results:
(with wget-1.11.1-1.fc9.i386)

GET / HTTP/1.0
User-Agent: Wget/1.11.1 (Red Hat modified)
Accept: */*
Host: localhost:8001
Connection: Keep-Alive


Expected results:
(with wget-1.10.2-16.fc8)

GET / HTTP/1.0
User-Agent: Wget/1.10.2 (Red Hat modified)
Accept: */*
Authorization: Basic bWF4Om1pbg==
Host: localhost:8001
Connection: Keep-Alive


Additional info:
Comment 1 Micah Cowan 2008-05-16 19:00:17 UTC 
This is not a bug. Clients should never send authentication headers before
receiving a challenge from the server. Among other reasons, this means sending
the password in cleartext, easily snooped by anyone between you and the server
(unless you're on an SSL connection; but even then it's inappropriate to assume
what authentication mechanism the server wants before it asks). The server might
well request Digest auth or some other, much more secure authentication
mechanism. This fix was introduced in 1.11.

However, there are some rare cases where the old behavior is still desirable
(for instance, servers that don't issue challenges because they normally use
form authentication, but support Basic auth as an alternative way to
authenticate). If this is you, then see the --auth-no-challenge, which was
introduced in 1.11.1, and restores the previous broken behavior from 1.10.2.

See also RFC 2617 (with which Wget still doesn't properly comply, but at least
it's a step closer).