212405 - Issue with Mozilla's (1.4) support for NTLM authentication.

Status: RESOLVED EXPIRED

(Core :: Networking: HTTP, defect)

Description

[a park]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.3.1) Gecko/20030425
Build Identifier: Mozilla 1.4

My company uses Surf Control as a proxy server.  During my first and second use
of Mozilla 1.4, a person from the Information Security department called me up
and asked me about multiple illegal "login" attempts to Surf Control.  She was
not referring to access of illegal sites.  She was referring to my account
trying to login into the surf control server.  These attempted logins coincided
with my browsing activities for the day.  The surf control server prompts me for
my W2K user name and password when I begin browsing after starting up mozilla. 
I successfully entered in my username and password and web browsing was normal
and without error.  I believe this issue has to do with NTLM authentication
because I have used Mozilla since 0.9.4 and have not had this problem at my
company perviously.  My company recently switched over to Surf Control, but I
had no previous problems with Mozilla 1.3.  Unfortunately, my company now knows
that I am using Mozilla (which is an unauthorized application).

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.  Proxy server must be Surf Control.
2.  Start Mozilla, Enter in Proxy (W2K network) User name and password (NO
PROBLEM HERE)
3.  Begin browsing.  Surf Control records illegal login attempts, but browsing
is normal.

Actual Results:  
I received a call from my company's information security department asking me
about illegal login attempts to the surf control proxy server.

Expected Results:  
I thought NTLM authentication would allow me to begin browsing without entering
in my username and password.  I also expected browsing to be similiar to Mozilla
1.3.

I think my computer may have actually experienced heavy load during the initial
two times that I attempted to use the browser.  I can not repeat this because
testing would violate my company's usage authorized software usage rules.

I had to uninstall mozilla 1.4 from my computer and that is the reason why I
write to you today from mozilla 1.31 which doesn't have the issue that I am
reporting to you now.

Comment 1

[Olivier Cahagne]

you should enter login as: DOMAIN\username if you want to use NTLM.
If still having issues, please attach a HTTP log, see instructions here:
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/netlib/http/http-debugging.html
Mozilla asks for credentials in NTLM mode because it's more secure according to
the developer Darin, see bug 199644 comment 4.
Your proxy seems to fallback to Basic auth, which explains why it can work with
Mozilla <1.4 (the first Mozilla release to implement NTLM is 1.4 on Win32).

Comment 2

[Olivier Cahagne]

Reporter, can you have a look at comment 1 and reply back on bugzilla ?

Comment 3

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This is an automated message, with ID "auto-resolve01".

This bug has had no comments for a long time. Statistically, we have found that
bug reports that have not been confirmed by a second user after three months are
highly unlikely to be the source of a fix to the code.

While your input is very important to us, our resources are limited and so we
are asking for your help in focussing our efforts. If you can still reproduce
this problem in the latest version of the product (see below for how to obtain a
copy) or, for feature requests, if it's not present in the latest version and
you still believe we should implement it, please visit the URL of this bug
(given at the top of this mail) and add a comment to that effect, giving more
reproduction information if you have it.

If it is not a problem any longer, you need take no action. If this bug is not
changed in any way in the next two weeks, it will be automatically resolved.
Thank you for your help in this matter.

The latest beta releases can be obtained from:
Firefox:     http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/
Thunderbird: http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/releases/1.5beta1.html
Seamonkey:   http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/

Comment 4

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This bug has been automatically resolved after a period of inactivity (see above
comment). If anyone thinks this is incorrect, they should feel free to reopen it.