1166244 - System Proxy Settings - stored authentication details not used on a Mac

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Core :: Networking: Proxy, defect, P5)

Description

[John Lockwood]

Attachment: Firefox2.jpg

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10_3) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/42.0.2311.152 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

I have a Squid3 Proxy Server running under Ubuntu Linux 12.0.4. Squid is set to require clients to authenticate and the authentication details are checked via LDAP to a directory server. The availability of the proxy server is defined using a proxy.pac aka. wpad.dat file and this is advertised via WPAD (Web Proxy Auto Discovery) using both DHCP and DNS methods. We are using a mixture of Mac OS X 10.9.5, 10.10.3 and Windows 7 clients. This works in Safari on the Mac, and IE on Windows 7.

On a Mac it is set to use "Automatic Proxy Discovery" which is Apple's term for using WPAD. When Safari is launched for the first time it asks for authentication details which Squid checks via LDAP, the Mac saves these credentials in the users login keychain. Safari will then ask for permission to access the keychain and these credentials, if allowed Safari will then be able to do this automatically thereafter without further user interaction. It is possible to modify the access permissions for these credentials in the keychain so that all applications can automatically access them and I have done this. This works for example for using the Mac App Store and iTunes.

Firefox on the Mac is set to use the system proxy settings i.e. the default option. It does correctly find the WPAD learned proxy server and does correctly send web traffic via the proxy server. It however incorrectly asks the user for authentication details even those as stated these are already stored in the users login keychain and have been made available to all applications.

Worse still, even if the user fills in authentication details (again) Firefox does not preserve these between sessions. When Firefox is next relaunched it will ask for authentication credentials to use the proxy server again. This happens regardless of whether the option to "Do not prompt for authentication if password is saved" is ticked or not.


Actual results:

Firefox successfully learns the System Proxy settings and sends the request to the proxy server but then (incorrectly) displays an authentication dialog for using the proxy server. If this is filled in it works - but only for that session. Next time Firefox is launched it asks for authentication details again.


Expected results:

Firefox did successfully learn the System Proxy settings to find and send traffic via the proxy server but failed to use the stored authentication details.

Comment 1

[John Lockwood]

Attachment: Firefox1.jpg

Comment 2

[John Lockwood]

Attachment: MacProxySetting.jpg

Comment 3

[John Lockwood]

Attachment: Keychain1.jpg

Comment 4

[John Lockwood]

Attachment: Keychain2.jpg

Comment 5

[John Lockwood]

I do not believe it will be relevant but if requested I can provide a copy of our proxy.pac aka. wpad.dat file. This file does not contain any references to authentication hence my belief it is not relevant.

Comment 6

[Firefox Bug Husbandry Bot]

Bulk change to priority: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1399258

Comment 7

[Firefox Bug Husbandry Bot]

Bulk change to priority: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1399258

Comment 8

[Jens Stutte [:jstutte]]

Bulk-downgrade of unassigned, >=3 years untouched DOM/Storage bug's priority.

If you have reason to believe this is wrong, please write a comment and ni :jstutte.

Comment 9

[BMO Automation]

Moving bug to Core/Networking: Proxy.