[hunchentoot-devel] Encoding problem

[Nicolas Neuss]

Hans Hübner <hans.huebner at gmail.com> writes:

> Hi Nicolas,
>
> On Thu, Oct 7, 2010 at 13:35, Nicolas Neuss <neuss at kit.edu> wrote:
>> I am trying to make Shibboleth authentification work for an application
>> of mine.  For this I am using the Apache2 Shibboleth module (my server
>> sits behind Apache).  Everything works fine, but for one thing.  The
>> authentification data is passed in the headers section in UTF-8 format
>> (probably).
>
> Before going into any depth on this, can you have a look at the
> headers and find out in what character set they are encoded?  HTTP
> headers must be encoded as ISO-8859-1.  If a client wants to send data
> in different encoding, quoted-printable encoding as described in RFC
> 2047 must be used.
>
> Thus, it would be a client error if you saw UTF-8 encoded data in
> headers.  If the data is properly encoded using RFC 2047 rules, the
> behavior that you see would be a bug.
>
> -Hans

Thanks Hans,

I think this helps to pin down the problem. 

For information about headers: I have called the server information page
while being Shibboleth authentificated and obtained the following:

http://ruprecht.mathematik.uni-karlsruhe.de/misc/info.html

I have the following in my Apache configuration file

    <VirtualHost *:443>
    ...
    <Location /sso>
            AuthType shibboleth
            ShibRequestSetting requireSession 1
            require valid-user
    </Location>

    ProxyVia On
    ProxyPassInterpolateEnv On
    ProxyPass /sso http://127.0.0.1:8004
    ProxyPassReverse /sso http://127.0.0.1:8004
    RequestHeader set sn %{sn}e
    ...
    </VirtualHost>

Maybe the data in the sn environment variable is in UTF-8 format and is
not encoded correctly for the header?

Nicolas