[sr-dev] [Kamailio] Why is the nonce expiry checked so late?

[Jan Janak]

Alex,

On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 4:13 PM, Alex Hermann <alex at speakup.nl> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Why is the nonce expiry checked in post_auth instead of pre_auth? Now the
> expiry is checked after the username/password is checked against the DB. That
> seems a bit odd.
>
> I moved the check to check_nonce (which is called from pre_auth) and it seems
> to work fine. Did I miss something? Security issue?

There are two major reasons for this:

The server sends back stale=true in digest credentials if the nonce
has expired, but only if the credentials are otherwise valid (i.e. the
username and the password are correct). The parameter stale=true
indicates to the user agent that there is no need to ask the user for
username and password again, it can just  generate a new authorization
header with cached username and password and a new nonce string from
the server.

The second reason is that we need to accept credentials with old nonce
string for ACK and CANCEL requests. Those two requests cannot be
challenged (There is no reply for ACK and CANCEL must have the same
CSeq as the request being canceled), thus we cannot ask the user agent
to resubmit them again with a new nonce.

  -- Jan