[WAGON-538] Basic authentication fails if the password contains non-ASCII characters

• Type: Bug
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Affects Version/s: 3.2.0
• Fix Version/s: 3.3.0, 3.3.1
• Component/s: wagon-http
• Assignee: Michael Osipov
• Reporter: Aleksander Gjermundsen
• Created: 11/Nov/18 15:32
• Updated: 02/Jan/19 21:02
• Resolved: 16/Dec/18 21:44

Description

If the username and/or password used to authenticate to Nexus contains non-ascii characters, the authentication fails with an access denied error. After using Wireshark to investigate the headers being sent (in my case "Ø", any non-ascii characters are replaced with "?".

To test, I have used the following configuration:

<settings xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/SETTINGS/1.0.0"
 xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
 xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/SETTINGS/1.0.0 http://maven.apache.org/xsd/settings-1.0.0.xsd">
...
    <servers>
        <server>
            <id>artifactory</id>
            <username>userØ</username>
            <password>userØ</password>
        </server>
    </servers>
    ...
    <mirrors>
        <mirror>
            <id>nexus</id>
            <mirrorOf>*</mirrorOf>
            <name>Local Nexus</name>
            <url>http://localhost:8081/repository/maven-public</url>
        </mirror>
    </mirrors>
...
</settings>

The settings.xml file is saved using UTF-8 encoding and it appears that Maven reads the username and passwords correctly into strings, but Apache HttpClient do not encode the UTF-8 characters when encoding them into base64.

I did a quick patch of Wagon to make it work for my use case, where HttpClient is configured to encode as UTF-8. As is mentioned in MNG-5917, it is not completely clear from the standards how these characters are supposed to be handled, but on my system both wget and the Chrome web browser encode the characters the same way as after my patch and are able to download files from Nexus.

Since Artifactory was used in MNG-5917, I also tested against that, but in contrast to Maven it was not able to decode the username and password correctly, however it would be broken without the patch anyway.

Issue Links

• depends upon: WAGON-539 Explicitly register only supported auth schemes
• depends upon: WAGON-540 Switch to modern-day encoding (UTF-8) of auth credentials
• is duplicated by: WAGON-443 WebDAV Wagon does not encode umlauts
• is duplicated by: WAGON-487 Saved password with french accent breaks deployment
• links to: GitHub Pull Request #52