Hello everyone,

Thank you for the good discussion on HTTP auth challenges last
Wednesday during the catalog sync.

As promised, here is an implementation proposal:

https://github.com/apache/iceberg/pull/14241

Let me know what you think!

Thanks,
Alex

On Wed, Oct 1, 2025 at 4:20 PM Alexandre Dutra <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> I'd like to propose enhancing the AuthManager API to support HTTP
> authentication challenges.
>
> Challenges are a crucial part of HTTP authentication: WWW-Authenticate
> response headers *must* be sent by the server with a 401
> (Unauthorized) HTTP response. And yet, the Iceberg REST client
> currently ignores them, and surfaces the 401 response as an error to
> the caller.
>
> This enhancement is important because authentication failures can
> occur at any moment. For example, an OAuth2 token that was valid at
> the time of the request might be manually revoked by the authorization
> server by the time the server processes the request, resulting in a
> 401 response.
>
> I think we could introduce a mechanism in the AuthSession interface to
> give it a chance to process the challenge, and maybe re-authenticate
> the client if possible. (What "re-authenticate" means depends on the
> auth scheme being used – it may not be always possible).
>
> If there's interest in this idea, I'm happy to provide an
> implementation for OAuth2.
>
> (Please note: This proposal is separate from the OAuth2 AuthManager
> donation / enhancements discussed in another email thread.)
>
> Thanks,
> Alex

Reply via email to