How to handle correctly HTTP Digest Authentication on iPhone

Question

Hello guys. I'm trying to upload a file onto my personal server.

I've written a small php page that works flawlessy so far.

The little weird thing is the fact that I generate all the body of the HTTP message I'm going to send (let's say that amounts to ~4 mb) and then I send the request to my server.

The server, then, asks for an HTTP challenge and my delegate connection:didReceiveAuthenticationChallenge:challenge replies to the server with the proper credentials and the data.

But, what's happened? The data has been sent twice!

In fact I've noticed that when I added the progressbar.. the apps sends the data (4mb), the server asks for authentication, the apps re-sends the data with the authentication (another 4mb). So, at the end, I've sent 8mb. That's wrong.

I started googling and searching for a solution but I can't figure out how to fix this.

The case scenarios are two (my guess):

• Share the realm for the whole session (a minimal HTTP request, then challenge, then data)
• Use the synchronized way to perform an HTTP connection (things that I do not want to do since it seems an ugly way to handle this kind of stuff to me)

Thank you

Answer 1

You've run into a flaw into the http protocol: you have to send all the data before getting the response with the auth challenge (when you send a request with no credentials). You can try doing a small round trip as the first request in the same session (as you've mentioned), like a HEAD request, then future requests will share the same nonce.