Server response gets cut off half way through - json

I have a REST API that returns json responses. Sometimes (and what seems to be at completely random), the json response gets cut off half-way through. So the returned json string looks like:
...route_short_name":"135","route_long_name":"Secte // end of response
I'm pretty sure it's not an encoding issue because the cut off point keeps changing position, depending on the json string that's returned. I haven't found a particular response size either for which the cut off happens (I've seen 65kb not get cut off, whereas 40kbs would).
Looking at the response header when the cut off does happen:
{
"Cache-Control" = "must-revalidate, private, max-age=0";
Connection = "keep-alive";
"Content-Type" = "application/json; charset=utf-8";
Date = "Fri, 11 May 2012 19:58:36 GMT";
Etag = "\"f36e55529c131f9c043b01e965e5f291\"";
Server = "nginx/1.0.14";
"Transfer-Encoding" = Identity;
"X-Rack-Cache" = miss;
"X-Runtime" = "0.739158";
"X-UA-Compatible" = "IE=Edge,chrome=1";
}
Doesn't ring a bell either. Anyone?

I had the same problem:
Nginx cut off some responses from the FastCGI backend. For example, I couldn't generate a proper SQL backup from PhpMyAdmin. I checked the logs and found this:
2012/10/15 02:28:14 [crit] 16443#0: *14534527 open()
"/usr/local/nginx/fastcgi_temp/4/81/0000004814" failed (13: Permission
denied) while reading upstream, client: *, server: , request:
"POST / HTTP/1.1", upstream: "fastcgi://127.0.0.1:9000", host:
"", referrer: "http://*/server_export.php?token=**"
All I had to do to fix it was to give proper permissions to the /usr/local/nginx/fastcgi_temp folder, as well as client_body_temp.
Fixed!
Thanks a lot samvermette, your Question & Answer put me on the right track.

Looked up my nginx error.log file and found the following:
13870 open() "/var/lib/nginx/tmp/proxy/9/00/0000000009" failed (13: Permission denied) while reading upstream...
Looks like nginx's proxy was trying to save the response content (passed in by thin) to a file. It only does so when the response size exceeds proxy_buffers (64kb by default on 64 bits platform). So in the end the bug was connected to my request response size.
I ended fixing my issue by setting proxy_buffering to off in my nginx config file, instead of upping proxy_buffers or fixing the file permission issue.
Still not sure about the purpose of nginx's buffer. I'd appreciate if anyone could add up on that. Is disabling the buffering completely a bad idea?

I had similar problem with cutting response from server.
It happened only when I added json header before returning response header('Content-type: application/json');
In my case gzip caused the issue.
I solved it by specifying gzip_types in nginx.conf and adding application/json to list before turning on gzip:
gzip_types text/plain text/html text/css application/x-javascript text/xml application/xml application/xml+rss text/javascript application/json;
gzip on;

It's possible you ran out of inodes, which prevents NginX from using the fastcgi_temp directory properly.
Try df -i and if you have 0% inodes free, that's a problem.
Try find /tmp -mtime 10 (older than 10 days) to see what might be filling up your disk.
Or maybe it's another directory with too many files. For example, go to /home/www-data/example.com and count the files:
find . -print | wc -l

Thanks for the question and the great answers, it saved me a lot of time. In the end, the answer of clement and sam helped me solve my issue, so the credits go to them.
Just wanted to point out that after reading a bit about the topic, it seems it is not recommended to disable proxy_buffering since it could make your server stall if the clients (user of your system) have a bad internet connection for example.
I found this discussion very useful to understand more.
The example of Francis Daly made it very clear for me:
Perhaps it is easier to think of the full process as a chain of processes.
web browser talks to nginx, over a 1 MB/s link.
nginx talks to upstream server, over a 100 MB/s link.
upstream server returns 100 MB of content to nginx.
nginx returns 100 MB of content to web browser.
With proxy_buffering on, nginx can hold the whole 100 MB, so the
nginx-upstream connection can be closed after 1 s, and then nginx can
spend 100 s sending the content to the web browser.
With proxy_buffering off, nginx can only take the content from upstream at
the same rate that nginx can send it to the web browser.
The web browser doesn't care about the difference -- it still takes 100
s for it to get the whole content.
nginx doesn't care much about the difference -- it still takes 100 s to
feed the content to the browser, but it does have to hold the connection
to upstream open for an extra 99 s.
Upstream does care about the difference -- what could have taken it 1
s actually takes 100 s; and for the extra 99 s, that upstream server is
not serving any other requests.
Usually: the nginx-upstream link is faster than the browser-nginx link;
and upstream is more "heavyweight" than nginx; so it is prudent to let
upstream finish processing as quickly as possible.

We had a similar problem. It was caused by our REST server (DropWizard) having SO_LINGER enabled. Under load DropWizard was disconnecting NGINX before it had a chance to flush it's buffers. The JSON was >8kb and the front end would receive it truncated.

I've also had this issue – JSON parsing client-side was faulty, the response was being cut off or worse still, the response was stale and was read from some random memory buffer.
After going through some guides – Serving Static Content Via POST From Nginx as well as Nginx: Fix to “405 Not Allowed” when using POST serving static while trying to configure nginx to serve a simple JSON file.
In my case, I had to use:
max_ranges 0;
so that the browser doesn't get any funny ideas when nginx adds Accept-Ranges: bytes in the response header) as well as
sendfile off;
in my server block for the proxy which serves the static files. Adding it to the location block which would finally serve the found JSON file didn't help.
Another protip for serving static JSONs would also be not forgetting the response type:
charset_types application/json;
default_type application/json;
charset utf-8;
Other searches yielded folder permission issues – nginx is cutting the end of dynamic pages and cache it or proxy buffering issues – Getting a chunked request through nginx, but that was not my case.

Related

ERR_HTTP2_PROTOCOL_ERROR in Chrome. Works in Firefox [duplicate]

I'm currently working on a website, which triggers a net::ERR_HTTP2_PROTOCOL_ERROR 200 error on Google Chrome. I'm not sure exactly what can provoke this error, I just noticed it pops out only when accessing the website in HTTPS. I can't be 100% sure it is related, but it looks like it prevents JavaScript to be executed properly.
For instance, the following scenario happens :
I'm accessing the website in HTTPS
My Twitter feed integrated via https://publish.twitter.com isn't loaded at all
I can notice in the console the ERR_HTTP2_PROTOCOL_ERROR
If I remove the code to load the Twitter feed, the error remains
If I access the website in HTTP, the Twitter feed appears and the error disappears
Google Chrome is the only web browser triggering the error: it works well on both Edge and Firefox.
(NB: I tried with Safari, and I have a similar kcferrordomaincfnetwork 303 error)
I was wondering if it could be related to the header returned by the server since there is this '200' mention in the error, and a 404 / 500 page isn't triggering anything.
Thing is the error isn't documented at all. Google search gives me very few results. Moreover, I noticed it appears on very recent Google Chrome releases; the error doesn't pop on v.64.X, but it does on v.75+ (regardless of the OS; I'm working on Mac tho).
Might be related to Website OK on Firefox but not on Safari (kCFErrorDomainCFNetwork error 303) neither Chrome (net::ERR_SPDY_PROTOCOL_ERROR)
Findings from further investigations are the following:
error doesn't pop on the exact same page if server returns 404 instead of 2XX
error doesn't pop on local with a HTTPS certificate
error pops on a different server (both are OVH's), which uses a different certificate
error pops no matter what PHP version is used, from 5.6 to 7.3 (framework used : Cakephp 2.10)
As requested, below is the returned header for the failing ressource, which is the whole web page. Even if the error is triggering on each page having a HTTP header 200, those pages are always loading on client's browser, but sometimes an element is missing (in my exemple, the external Twitter feed). Every other asset on the Network tab has a success return, except the whole document itself.
Google Chrome header (with error):
Firefox header (without error):
A curl --head --http2 request in console returns the following success:
HTTP/2 200
date: Fri, 04 Oct 2019 08:04:51 GMT
content-type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
content-length: 127089
set-cookie: SERVERID31396=2341116; path=/; max-age=900
server: Apache
x-powered-by: PHP/7.2
set-cookie: xxxxx=0919c5563fc87d601ab99e2f85d4217d; expires=Fri, 04-Oct-2019 12:04:51 GMT; Max-Age=14400; path=/; secure; HttpOnly
vary: Accept-Encoding
Trying to go deeper with the chrome://net-export/ and https://netlog-viewer.appspot.com tools is telling me the request ends with a RST_STREAM :
t=123354 [st=5170] HTTP2_SESSION_RECV_RST_STREAM
--> error_code = "2 (INTERNAL_ERROR)"
--> stream_id = 1
For what I read in this other post, "In HTTP/2, if the client wants to abort the request, it sends a RST_STREAM. When the server receives a RST_STREAM, it will stop sending DATA frames to the client, thereby stopping the response (or the download). The connection is still usable for other requests, and requests/responses that were concurrent with the one that has been aborted may continue to progress.
[...]
It is possible that by the time the RST_STREAM travels from the client to the server, the whole content of the request is in transit and will arrive to the client, which will discard it. However, for large response contents, sending a RST_STREAM may have a good chance to arrive to the server before the whole response content is sent, and therefore will save bandwidth."
The described behavior is the same as the one I can observe. But that would mean the browser is the culprit, and then I wouldn't understand why it happens on two identical pages with one having a 200 header and the other a 404 (same goes if I disable JS).
In my case it was - no disk space left on the web server.
For several weeks I was also annoyed by this "bug":
net :: ERR_HTTP2_PROTOCOL_ERROR 200
In my case, it occurred on images generated by PHP.
It was at header() level, and on this one in particular:
header ('Content-Length:'. Filesize($cache_file));
It did obviously not return the exact size, so I deleted it and everything works fine now.
So Chrome checks the accuracy of the data transmitted via the headers, and if it does not correspond, it fails.
EDIT
I found why content-length via filesize was being miscalculated: the GZIP compression is active on the PHP files, so excluding the file in question will fix the problem. Put this code in the .htaccess:
SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI ^ / thumb.php no-gzip -vary
It works and we keep the header Content-length.
I am finally able to solve this error after researching some things I thought is causing the error for 24 errors. I visited all the pages across the web. And I am happy to say that I have found the solution.
If you are using NGINX, then set gzip to off and add proxy_max_temp_file_size 0; in the server block like I have shown below.
server {
...
...
gzip off;
proxy_max_temp_file_size 0;
location / {
proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:3000/;
....
Why? Because what actually happening was all the contents were being compressed twice and we don't want that, right?!
The fix for me was setting minBytesPerSecond in IIS to 0. This setting can be found in system.applicationHost/webLimits in IIS's Configuration Editor. By default it's set to 240.
It turns out that some web servers will cut the connection to a client if the server's data throughput to the client passes below a certain limit. This is to protect against "slow drip" denial of service attacks. However, this limit can also be triggered in cases where an innocent user requests many resources all at once (such as lots of images on a single page), and the server is forced to ration the bandwidth for each request so much that it causes one or more requests to drop below the throughput limit, which causes the server to cut the connection and shows up as net::ERR_HTTP2_PROTOCOL_ERROR in Chrome.
For example, if you request 11 GIF images all at once, and each individual GIF is 10 megabytes (11 * 10 = 110 megabytes total), and the server is only able to serve at 100 megabytes per second (per thread), the server will have to slow the throughput on the last GIF image until the first 10 are finished. If the throughput on that last GIF is slowed so much that it drops below the minBytesPerSecond limit, it will cut the connection.
I was able to resolve this by following these steps:
I used Chrome's Network Log Export tool at chrome://net-export/ to see exactly what was behind the ERR_HTTP2_PROTOCOL_ERROR error. I started the log, reproduced the error, and stopped the log.
I imported the log into the log viewer at https://netlog-viewer.appspot.com/#import, and saw an interesting event titled HTTP2_SESSION_RECV_RST_STREAM, with error code 8 (CANCEL).
I did some Googling on the term "RST_STREAM" (which appears to be an abbreviated form of "reset stream") and found a discussion between some people talking about an IIS setting called minBytesPerSecond (discussion here: https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/aeb01c46-bcdf-40ed-a417-8a3558221137). I also found another discussion where there was some debate about whether minBytesPerSecond was intended to protect against slow HTTP DoS (slow drip) attacks (discussion here: IIS 8.5 low minBytesPerSecond not working against slow HTTP POST). In any case, I learned that IIS uses minBytesPerSecond to determine whether to cancel a connection if it cannot sustain the minimum throughput. This is relevant in cases where a single user makes many requests to a large resource, and each new connection ends up starving all the other unfinished ones, to the point where some may fall below the minBytesPerSecond threshold.
To confirm that the server was canceling requests due to a minBytesPerSecond error, I checked my server's HTTPERR log at c:\windows\system32\logfiles\httperr. Sure enough, I opened the file and did a text search for "MinBytesPerSecond" and there were tons of entries for it.
So after I changed the minBytesPerSecond to 0, I was no longer able to reproduce the ERR_HTTP2_PROTOCOL_ERROR error. So, it appears that the ERR_HTTP2_PROTOCOL_ERROR error was being caused by my server (IIS) canceling the request because the throughput rate from my server fell below the minBytesPerSecond threshold.
So for all you reading this right now, if you're not using IIS, maybe there is a similar setting related to minimum throughput rate you can play with to see if it gets rid of the ERR_HTTP2_PROTOCOL_ERROR error.
I experienced a similar problem, I was getting ERR_HTTP2_PROTOCOL_ERROR on one of the HTTP GET requests.
I noticed that the Chrome update was pending, so I updated the Chrome browser to the latest version and the error was gone next time when I relaunched the browser.
I encountered this because the http2 server closed the connection when sending a big response to the Chrome.
Why?
Because it is just a setting of the http2 server, named WriteTimeout.
I had this problem when having a Nginx server that exposing the node-js application to the external world. The Nginx made the file (css, js, ...) compressed with gzip and with Chrome it looked like the same.
The problem solved when we found that the node-js server is also compressed the content with gzip. In someway, this double compressing leading to this problem. Canceling node-js compression solved the issue.
I didn't figure out what exactly was happening, but I found a solution.
The CDN feature of OVH was the culprit. I had it installed on my host service but disabled for my domain because I didn't need it.
Somehow, when I enable it, everything works.
I think it forces Apache to use the HTTP2 protocol, but what I don't understand is that there indeed was an HTTP2 mention in each of my headers, which I presume means the server was answering using the right protocol.
So the solution for my very particular case was to enable the CDN option on all concerned domains.
If anyone understands better what could have happened here, feel free to share explanations.
I faced this error several times and, it was due to transferring large resources(larger than 3MB) from server to client.
This error is currently being fixed: https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/c/chromium/src/+/2001234
But it helped me, changing nginx settings:
turning on gzip;
add_header 'Cache-Control' 'no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, proxy-revalidate, max-age=0';
expires off;
In my case, Nginx acts as a reverse proxy for Node.js application.
We experienced this problem on pages with long Base64 strings. The problem occurs because we use CloudFlare.
Details: https://community.cloudflare.com/t/err-http2-protocol-error/119619.
Key section from the forum post:
After further testing on Incognito tabs on multiple browsers, then
doing the changes on the code from a BASE64 to a real .png image, the
issue never happened again, in ANY browser. The .png had around 500kb
before becoming a base64,so CloudFlare has issues with huge lines of
text on same line (since base64 is a long string) as a proxy between
the domain and the heroku. As mentioned before, directly hitting
Heroku url also never happened the issue.
The temporary hack is to disable HTTP/2 on CloudFlare.
Hope someone else can produce a better solution that doesn't require disabling HTTP/2 on CloudFlare.
In our case, the reason was invalid header.
As mentioned in Edit 4:
take the logs
in the viewer choose Events
chose HTTP2_SESSION
Look for something similar:
HTTP2_SESSION_RECV_INVALID_HEADER
--> error = "Invalid character in header name."
--> header_name = "charset=utf-8"
By default nginx limits upload size to 1MB.
With client_max_body_size you can set your own limit, as in
location /uploads {
...
client_max_body_size 100M;
}
You can set this setting also on the http or server block instead (See here).
This fixed my issue with net::ERR_HTTP2_PROTOCOL_ERROR
Just posting here to let people know that ERR_HTTP2_PROTOCOL_ERROR in Chrome can also be caused by an unexpected response to a CORS request.
In our case, the OPTIONS request was successful, but the following PUT that should upload an image to our infrastructure was denied with a 410 (because of a missing configuration allowing uploads) resulting in Chrome issuing a ERR_HTTP2_PROTOCOL_ERROR.
When checking in Firefox, the error message was much more helpful:
Cross-Origin Request Blocked: The Same Origin Policy disallows reading the remote resource at https://www.[...] (Reason: CORS header ‘Access-Control-Allow-Origin’ missing). Status code: 410.
My recommendation would be to check an alternative browser in this case.
I'm not convinced this was the issue but through cPanel I'd noticed the PHP version was on 5.6 and changing it to 7.3 seemed to fix it. This was for a WordPress site. I noticed I could access images and generic PHP files but loading WordPress itself caused the error.
Seems like many issues may cause ERR_HTTP2_PROTOCOL_ERROR: in my case it was a minor syntax error in a php-generated header, Content-Type : text/plain . You might notice the space before the colon... that was it. Works no problem when the colon is right next to the header name like Content-Type: text/plain. Only took a million hours to figure out... The error happens with Chrome only, Firefox loaded the object without complaint.
If simply restarting e.g., Chrome Canary, with a fresh profile fixes the problem, then one surely
is the "victim" of a failed Chrome Variation! Yes, there are ways to opt out of being a Guinea pig in Chrome's field testing.
In my case
header params can not set null or empty string
{
'Authorization': Authorization //Authorization can't use null or ''
}
I got the same issue (asp, c# - HttpPostedFileBase) when posting a file that was larger than 1MB (even though application doesn't have any limitation for file size), for me the simplification of model class helped. If you got this issue, try to remove some parts of the model, and see if it will help in any way. Sounds strange, but worked for me.
I have been experiencing this problem for the last week now as I've been trying to send DELETE requests to my PHP server through AJAX. I recently upgraded my hosting plan where I now have an SSL Certificate on my host which stores the PHP and JS files. Since adding an SSL Certificate I no longer experience this issue. Hoping this helps with this strange error.
I also faced this error and I believe there can be multiple reasons behind it. Mine was, ARR was getting timed-out.
In my case, browser was making a request to a reverse proxy site where I have set my redirection rules and that proxy site is eventually requesting the actual site. Now for huge data it was taking more than 2 minutes 5 seconds and Application Request Routing timeout for my server was set to 2 minutes. I fixed this by increasing the ARR timeout by below steps:
1. Go to IIS
2. Click on server name
3. Click on Application Request Routing Cache in the middle pane
4. Click Server Proxy settings in right pane
5. Increase the timeout
6. Click Apply
My team saw this on a single javascript file we were serving up. Every other file worked fine. We switched from http2 back to http1.1 and then either net::ERR_INCOMPLETE_CHUNKED_ENCODING or ERR_CONTENT_LENGTH_MISMATCH. We ultimately discovered that there was a corporate filter (Trustwave) that was erroneously detecting an "infoleak" (we suspect it detected something in our file/filename that resembled a social security number). Getting corporate to tweak this filter resolved our issues.
For my situation this error was caused by having circular references in json sent from the server when using an ORM for parent/child relationships. So the quick and easy solution was
JsonConvert.SerializeObject(myObject, new JsonSerializerSettings { ReferenceLoopHandling = ReferenceLoopHandling.Ignore })
The better solution is to create DTOs that do not contain the references on both sides (parent/child).
I had another case that caused an ERR_HTTP2_PROTOCOL_ERROR that hasn't been mentioned here yet. I had created a cross reference in IOC (Unity), where I had class A referencing class B (through a couple of layers), and class B referencing class A. Bad design on my part really. But I created a new interface/class for the method in class A that I was calling from class B, and that cleared it up.
I hit this issue working with Server Sent Events. The problem was solved when I noticed that the domain name I used to initiate the connection included a trailing slash, e.g. https://foo.bar.bam/ failed with ERR_HTTP_PROTOCOL_ERROR while https://foo.bar.bam worked.
In my case (nginx on windows proxying an app while serving static assets on its own) page was showing multiple assets including 14 bigger pictures; those errors were shown for about 5 of those images exactly after 60 seconds; in my case it was a default send_timeout of 60s making those image requests fail; increasing the send_timeout made it work
I am not sure what is causing nginx on windows to serve those files so slow - it is only 11.5MB of resources which takes nginx almost 2 minutes to serve but I guess it is subject for another thread
In my case, the problem was that Bitdefender provided me with a local ssl certificate, when the website was still without a certificate.
When I disabled Bitdefender and reloaded the page, the actual valid server ssl certificate was loaded, and the ERR_HTTP2_PROTOCOL_ERROR was gone.
In my case, it was WordPress that now requires PHP 7.4 and I was running 7.2.
As soon as I updated, the errors disappeared.
Happened again and this time it was the ad-blocker that didn't like the name of my images (yt.png, ig.png, url.png). I added a prefix and all loaded ok.
In my case, the time on my computer (browser client) was out of date, synced it using settings in windows, and then the error got away
I had line breaks in my Content-Security-Policy in my nginx.conf that produced this error when used in an docker container running in Kube in GCP (serving angular but I doubt that matters).
Putting them all back on the same line and the problem went away.
A curl -v helped diagnose.
http2 error: Invalid HTTP header field was received: frame type: 1, stream: 1, name: [content-security-policy], value: [script-src 'unsafe-inline' 'self....
It was much easier to edit on separate lines but never again!

Chrome ignores the ETag header and just uses the in memory cache/disk cache

If I understand correctly, the flow for using ETags works as described now:
Browser sends the request to the server. Server sends back the image with an ETag
Browser saves the ressource along with the ETag
On the next request, the browser sends the request with the header If-None-Match containing the saved ETag.
When returning a response, chrome dev tools tells me these are my headers
Cache-Control:max-age=7200
Connection:keep-alive
Content-Type:image/png
Date:Thu, 27 Apr 2017 13:42:57 GMT
ETag:"b36f59c868d4678033d318a182658e18371df8f5"
Expires:Thu, 27 Apr 2017 15:42:57 GMT
Server:nginx
Transfer-Encoding:chunked
X-Debug-Token:873c8f
X-Debug-Token-Link:http://localhost:8081/_profiler/873c8f
Now, when I reload the page, the new image isn't gathered, though. It's saved through Chrome's in-memory cache or disk cache as you can see here
But why is this happening? I sent an ETag so why does the browser not make another request to the server but instead uses it's own cache?
The reason I'm asking is, that we want to cache our images, but as soon as they change, they should be updated immedietely. Why does Chrome do that?
Update
I just noticed that it works as intendent on Firefox, so this seems to be a chrome "feature" and not a configuration one.
Update 2
After setting my new headers for image like this
Cache-Control:max-age=0, private
Connection:keep-alive
Content-Type:image/png
Date:Thu, 27 Apr 2017 14:44:57 GMT
ETag:"e5b18bdebe44ed4bba3acb6584d9e6a81692ee27"
Expires:Fri, 27 Oct 2017 14:44:57 GMT
Server:nginx
Transfer-Encoding:chunked
X-Debug-Token:3447a6
X-Debug-Token-Link:http://localhost:8081/_profiler/3447a6
Chrome still uses the disk cache to laod the data. This is my nginx now
location ~* \.(?:jpg|jpeg|gif|png|ico|cur|gz|svg|svgz|mp4|ogg|ogv|webm|htc)$ {
access_log off;
add_header Cache-Control "max-age: 0, must-revalidate";
}
Update 3
I just did some further research. As soon as the Expires tag is set, Chrome uses the in-memory or disk-cache. Same with max-age. Which I don't understand, even when must-revalidate is set, as soon as Expires or max-age=>0 is set, Chrome doesn't reload the ressource.
The server is telling chrome that the resource is good for the next 2 hours (7200 seconds). Presumably your second request was sooner than that.
You would be better served with max-age: 0 or perhaps max-age: 0, must-revalidate. Then while you'll never get a fully-cached operation (not even bothering to hit the server) you can still have the server send 304 Not Modified responses to tell the browser that it can use the cached entity (and update any metadata based on headers if applicable) so while you still have a request-response happening only around 300bytes will be sent rather than however many kilobytes or more the entity is.
For anyone else who might land here, note that Chrome does not cache anything if there are any SSL errors (such as if you're using a self-signed certificate).
Original post that clued me in: https://stackoverflow.com/a/55101722/9536265
Chrome bug: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=110649 (and it appears they will never fix it, which seems ridiculous since almost all developers will be developing in that very situation)
I have not been able to confirm with documentation, but the behavior appears to be the same with Edge Chromium. Firefox, on the other hand, will happily follow standard cache practices for sites using "Not secure" certificates such as those with imperfectly-matching site names or self-signed certificates. I have not tested Safari.
For ETags to be used and the browser to send the If-Modified-Since and If-None-Match headers, the cache control must be set to no-cache.
Either by the server using the Cache-Control: no-cache header or by the browser through the Request.cache = 'no-cache' option.
Read more about the cache options here: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Request/cache.
This is an old post but this is how we solved it.
#Musterknabe Comment on your update 3:
The same thing happened with us, even after setting
must-revalidate chrome was not reloading fresh resources. I found out that since resources were already present in clients/browser cache memory they were being served from memory cache and the new request(to get static resources) was not firing resulting. So response headers were not updated with must-revalidate
To fix this problem we used two steps:
1. Changed resource file names - To make sure new request will be fired
2. Added cache-control headers to static files(In startup.cs) - To take care of future static resource file changes. So that going forward we don't have to change the resource file names.
public void Configure(IApplicationBuilder app)
{
app.UseStaticFiles(new StaticFileOptions
{
OnPrepareResponse = ctx =>
{
const int durationInSeconds = 0;
ctx.Context.Response.Headers[HeaderNames.CacheControl] =
"must-revalidate,max-age=" + durationInSeconds;
}
});
}
Hope it helps.

Google Chrome forcing download of "f.txt" file

After updating to Chrome 40.0.2214.111, variably when I visit certain Google related sites (like http://youtube.com and get presented with an ad before the video), the browser downloads a file named f.txt.
I do not have any adblock plugins installed.
f.txt contains a few lines of JavaScript...starting with:
if (!window.mraid) {document.write('\x3cdiv class="GoogleActiveViewClass" ' +'id="DfaVisibilityIdentifier_3851468350"\x3e');}document.write('\x3ca target\x3d\x22_blank\x22 href\x3d\x22https://adclick.g.doubleclick.net/pcs/click?xai\x3dAKAOjsvDhmmoi2r124JkMyiBGALWfUlTX-zFA1gEdFeZDgdS3JKiEDPl3iIYGtj9Tv2yTJtASqD6S-yqbuNQH5u6fXm4rThyCZ0plv9SXM-UPKJgH4KSS08c97Eim4i45ewgN9OoG3E_
In looking up the issue on Google, others have experienced the same, but I have not found any resolution or understanding of why this is happening. I assume it is a content-disposition related bug with some of the JS files loaded on the page, and will clear up in a future patch.
Wondering if anybody else had experienced / insight.
This issue appears to be causing ongoing consternation, so I will attempt to give a clearer answer than the previously posted answers, which only contain partial hints as to what's happening.
Some time around the summer of 2014, IT Security Engineer Michele Spagnuolo (apparently employed at Google Zurich) developed a proof-of-concept exploit and supporting tool called Rosetta Flash that demonstrated a way for hackers to run malicious Flash SWF files from a remote domain in a manner which tricks browsers into thinking it came from the same domain the user was currently browsing. This allows bypassing of the "same-origin policy" and can permit hackers a variety of exploits. You can read the details here: https://miki.it/blog/2014/7/8/abusing-jsonp-with-rosetta-flash/
Known affected browsers: Chrome, IE
Possibly unaffected browsers: Firefox
Adobe has released at least 5 different fixes over the past year while trying to comprehensively fix this vulnerability, but various major websites also introduced their own fixes earlier on in order to prevent mass vulnerability to their userbases. Among the sites to do so: Google, Youtube, Facebook, Github, and others. One component of the ad-hoc mitigation implemented by these website owners was to force the HTTP Header Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=f.txt on the returns from JSONP endpoints. This has the annoyance of causing the browser to automatically download a file called f.txt that you didn't request—but it is far better than your browser automatically running a possibly malicious Flash file.
In conclusion, the websites you were visiting when this file spontaneously downloaded are not bad or malicious, but some domain serving content on their pages (usually ads) had content with this exploit inside it. Note that this issue will be random and intermittent in nature because even visiting the same pages consecutively will often produce different ad content. For example, the advertisement domain ad.doubleclick.net probably serves out hundreds of thousands of different ads and only a small percentage likely contain malicious content. This is why various users online are confused thinking they fixed the issue or somehow affected it by uninstalling this program or running that scan, when in fact it is all unrelated. The f.txt download just means you were protected from a recent potential attack with this exploit and you should have no reason to believe you were compromised in any way.
The only way I'm aware that you could stop this f.txt file from being downloaded again in the future would be to block the most common domains that appear to be serving this exploit. I've put a short list below of some of the ones implicated in various posts. If you wanted to block these domains from touching your computer, you could add them to your firewall or alternatively you could use the HOSTS file technique described in the second section of this link: http://www.chromefans.org/chrome-tutorial/how-to-block-a-website-in-google-chrome.htm
Short list of domains you could block (by no means a comprehensive list). Most of these are highly associated with adware and malware:
ad.doubleclick.net
adclick.g.doubleclick.net
secure-us.imrworldwide.com
d.turn.com
ad.turn.com
secure.insightexpressai.com
core.insightexpressai.com
I experienced the same issue, same version of Chrome though it's unrelated to the issue. With the developer console I captured an instance of the request that spawned this, and it is an API call served by ad.doubleclick.net. Specifically, this resource returns a response with Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="f.txt".
The URL I happened to capture was https://ad.doubleclick.net/adj/N7412.226578.VEVO/B8463950.115078190;sz=300x60...
Per curl:
$ curl -I 'https://ad.doubleclick.net/adj/N7412.226578.VEVO/B8463950.115078190;sz=300x60;click=https://2975c.v.fwmrm.net/ad/l/1?s=b035&n=10613%3B40185%3B375600%3B383270&t=1424475157058697012&f=&r=40185&adid=9201685&reid=3674011&arid=0&auid=&cn=defaultClick&et=c&_cc=&tpos=&sr=0&cr=;ord=435266097?'
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
P3P: policyref="https://googleads.g.doubleclick.net/pagead/gcn_p3p_.xml", CP="CURa ADMa DEVa TAIo PSAo PSDo OUR IND UNI PUR INT DEM STA PRE COM NAV OTC NOI DSP COR"
Date: Fri, 20 Feb 2015 23:35:38 GMT
Pragma: no-cache
Expires: Fri, 01 Jan 1990 00:00:00 GMT
Cache-Control: no-cache, must-revalidate
Content-Type: text/javascript; charset=ISO-8859-1
X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="f.txt"
Server: cafe
X-XSS-Protection: 1; mode=block
Set-Cookie: test_cookie=CheckForPermission; expires=Fri, 20-Feb-2015 23:50:38 GMT; path=/; domain=.doubleclick.net
Alternate-Protocol: 443:quic,p=0.08
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Accept-Ranges: none
Vary: Accept-Encoding
FYI, after reading this thread, I took a look at my installed programs and found that somehow, shortly after upgrading to Windows 10 (possibly/probably? unrelated), an ASK search app was installed as well as a Chrome extension (Windows was kind enough to remind to check that). Since removing, I have not have the f.txt issue.
This can occur on android too not just computers. Was browsing using Kiwi when the site I was on began to endlessly redirect so I cut net access to close it out and noticed my phone had DL'd something f.txt in my downloaded files.
Deleted it and didn't open.
Seems related to https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/google-caja-discuss/ite6K5c8mqs/Ayqw72XJ9G8J.
The so-called "Rosetta Flash" vulnerability is that allowing arbitrary
yet identifier-like text at the beginning of a JSONP response is
sufficient for it to be interpreted as a Flash file executing in that
origin. See for more information:
http://miki.it/blog/2014/7/8/abusing-jsonp-with-rosetta-flash/
JSONP responses from the proxy servlet now:
* are prefixed with "/**/", which still allows them to execute as JSONP
but removes requester control over the first bytes of the response.
* have the response header Content-Disposition: attachment.

WebSocket permessage-deflate in Chrome with no context takeover

I have this problem with compression, and I am not sure if it is a bug. My WebSocket server does not support context takeover, and I am having problems sending messages, but not receiving.
The browser issues a request like this:
GET /socket HTTP/1.1
Host: thirdparty.com
Origin: http://example.com
Connection: Upgrade
Upgrade: websocket
Sec-WebSocket-Version: 13
Sec-WebSocket-Key: dGhlIHNhbXBsZSBub25jZQ==
Sec-WebSocket-Extensions: permessage-deflate; client_max_window_bits, x-webkit-deflate-frame
If the server does not specify any option about context takeover:
HTTP/1.1 101 Switching Protocols
Upgrade: websocket
Connection: Upgrade
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: http://example.com
Sec-WebSocket-Accept: s3pPLMBiTxaQ9kYGzzhZRbK+xOo=
Sec-WebSocket-Extensions: permessage-deflate
I can read and write the first message, but cannot do subsequent reads or writes, because Chrome expects the server is keeping the context.
So my server provides this answer:
HTTP/1.1 101 Switching Protocols
Upgrade: websocket
Connection: Upgrade
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: http://example.com
Sec-WebSocket-Accept: s3pPLMBiTxaQ9kYGzzhZRbK+xOo=
Sec-WebSocket-Extensions: permessage-deflate; client_no_context_takeover; server_no_context_takeover
And now I can receive messages without problems, but again, I can only send the first message, the second message fails, and I see an error in Chrome saying that it failed at inflating the frame. I tried to send two identical strings, and I can see how the server is sending twice the same data, but the client fails to decompress it the second time.
So it seems that Chrome accepts the client_no_context_takeover parameter that specify that the client won't use the same compression context for all messages when compressing, but ignores server_no_context_takeover indicates the server won't use the same context.
Is this a bug in Chrome? I am not clear about if I can send options back that have not been offered/requested by the client.
Is there any other option I can use to disable the client context takeover?
UPDATE:
In WebSocketPerMessageDeflate.cpp in the Chromium source code, I can see:
if (clientNoContextTakeover != parameters.end()) {
if (!clientNoContextTakeover->value.isNull()) {
m_failureReason = "Received invalid client_no_context_takeover parameter";
return false;
}
mode = WebSocketDeflater::DoNotTakeOverContext;
++numProcessedParameters;
}
But also:
if (serverNoContextTakeover != parameters.end()) {
if (!serverNoContextTakeover->value.isNull()) {
m_failureReason = "Received invalid server_no_context_takeover parameter";
return false;
}
++numProcessedParameters;
}
In the first snippet, it is setting the "mode" variable, but in the second one is not doing nothing, so it seems it is basically ignoring the parameter.
Cheers.
A server must send a server_no_context_takeover parameter in a response only if the client requested the "no context takeover". In essence, the server acknowledges the client's request.
If a server decides to do "no context takeover" for sending on it's own (without the client having requested it), that's fine. In this case, no parameter is sent by the server.
A deflate sender can always on it's own drop compression context and/or reduce compression window size. There is no need to tell the receiver. The deflate wire format has enough information for the receiver to cope with that.
Here is how configuration and handshake looks with Crossbar.io.
I finally found the problem.
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-hybi-permessage-compression-17#section-8.2.3
8.2.3.4. Using a DEFLATE Block with BFINAL Set to 1
Going through the examples in the draft I found my server was sending slightly different payloads. Turned out that the problem was the BFINAL, I need to set it to 0 by adding a 0 byte at the end.
Now it works.

Help with HTTP Intercepting Proxy in Ruby?

I have the beginnings of an HTTP Intercepting Proxy written in Ruby:
require 'socket' # Get sockets from stdlib
server = TCPServer.open(8080) # Socket to listen on port 8080
loop { # Servers run forever
Thread.start(server.accept) do |client|
puts "** Got connection!"
#output = ""
#host = ""
#port = 80
while line = client.gets
line.chomp!
if (line =~ /^(GET|CONNECT) .*(\.com|\.net):(.*) (HTTP\/1.1|HTTP\/1.0)$/)
#port = $3
elsif (line =~ /^Host: (.*)$/ && #host == "")
#host = $1
end
print line + "\n"
#output += line + "\n"
# This *may* cause problems with not getting full requests,
# but without this, the loop never returns.
break if line == ""
end
if (#host != "")
puts "** Got host! (#{#host}:#{#port})"
out = TCPSocket.open(#host, #port)
puts "** Got destination!"
out.print(#output)
while line = out.gets
line.chomp!
if (line =~ /^<proxyinfo>.*<\/proxyinfo>$/)
# Logic is done here.
end
print line + "\n"
client.print(line + "\n")
end
out.close
end
client.close
end
}
This simple proxy that I made parses the destination out of the HTTP request, then reads the HTTP response and performs logic based on special HTML tags. The proxy works for the most part, but seems to have trouble dealing with binary data and HTTPS connections.
How can I fix these problems?
First, you would probably be better off building on an existing Ruby HTTP proxy implementation. One such is already available in the Ruby standard library, namely WEBrick::HTTPProxyServer. See for example this related question for an implementation based on that same class: Webrick transparent proxy.
Regarding proxying HTTPS, you can't do much more than just pass the raw bytes. As HTTPS is cryptographically protected, you cannot inspect the contents at the HTTP protocol level. It is just an opaque stream of bytes.
WEBrick is blocking I/O ... This mean it does not able to stream the response. For example if you go on a youtube page to see a video, the stream will not be forwarded to your browser until the proxy have downloaded all the video cotent.
If you want the video be played in your browser during it download, you have to look for a non blocking I/O solution like EventMachine.
For HTTPS the solution is a little bit complicated since you have to develop a man in the middle proxy.
This was an old question, but for the sake of completeness here goes another answer.
I've implemented a HTTP/HTTPS interception proxy in Ruby, the project is hosted in github.
The HTTP case is obvious, HTTPS interception in accomplished via an HTTPS server that acts as a reverse proxy (and handles the TLS handshake). I.e.
Client(e.g. Browser) <--> Proxy1 <--> HTTPS Reverse Proxy <--> Target Server
As Valko mentioned, when a client connects to a HTTPS server through a proxy, you'll see a stream of encrypted bytes (since SSL provides end-to-end encryption). But not everything is encrypted, the proxy needs to know to whom the stream of bytes should be forwarded, so the client issues a CONNECT host:port request (being the body of the request the SSL stream).
The trick here is that the first proxy will forward this request to the HTTPS Reverse Proxy instead of the real target server. This reverse proxy will handle the SSL negotiation with the client, have access to the decrypted requests, and send copies (optionally altered versions) of these requests to the real target server by acting as a normal client. It will get the responses from the target server, (optionally) alter the responses, and send them back to the client.