Subject: [PATCH v2 0/4] http: fix emptyAuth=auto for Negotiate/SPNEGO

From: "Matthew John Cheetham via GitGitGadget" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 30 Apr 2026 10:54:28 +0000

When a server advertises Negotiate (SPNEGO) authentication alongside Basic,
the "auto" mode of http.emptyAuth should allow libcurl to attempt Kerberos
authentication using the system ticket cache before falling back to
credential_fill(). Currently this never happens due to an interaction
between two older features.

The Negotiate-stripping logic from 4dbe66464b (remote-curl: fall back to
Basic auth if Negotiate fails, 2015-01-08) removes CURLAUTH_GSSNEGOTIATE on
the first 401, before the auto-detection from 40a18fc77c (http: add an
"auto" mode for http.emptyauth, 2017-02-25) gets a chance to see it as an
"exotic" method. The result is that auto mode silently degrades to the same
behavior as emptyAuth=false for any server whose only non-Basic/Digest
method is Negotiate, forcing Kerberos users to manually set
http.emptyAuth=true to get seamless ticket-based authentication.

This series fixes the interaction by delaying the Negotiate stripping in
auto mode by one round-trip, giving empty auth a chance to use the system
Kerberos ticket. If there is no valid ticket, Negotiate is stripped on the
second 401 and we fall through to credential_fill() as before. The true and
false modes are unchanged.

Patch 1: Extract a http_reauth_prepare() helper from the three retry paths
that call credential_fill() on HTTP_REAUTH. Pure refactor, no behavior
change.

Patch 2: Delay the GSSNEGOTIATE stripping in auto mode and teach
http_reauth_prepare() to skip credential_fill() when empty auth should be
attempted first.

Patch 3: Add tests verifying that auto mode produces an extra round-trip
(empty auth attempt) compared to false mode, using the existing
nph-custom-auth.sh CGI infrastructure.

Patch 4: Update http.emptyAuth documentation to clarify possible values
(true, false, and auto).

There is a trade-off in auto mode: when a server advertises Negotiate but
the client has no valid Kerberos ticket, there is one extra round-trip
compared to the current behavior. This matches the trade-off already
documented in 40a18fc77c. Users who want to avoid it can set
http.emptyAuth=false.

Note: this patch series was taken early into Git for Windows for the
2.54.0-rc2 release.
https://github.com/git-for-windows/git/commit/8e94b65c003783d7d7b09d9fccdf06a1363e347c

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Update in v2:

 * Add patch 4 to clarify the available options for http.emptyAuth in the
   config documentation.

Matthew John Cheetham (4):
  http: extract http_reauth_prepare() from retry paths
  http: attempt Negotiate auth in http.emptyAuth=auto mode
  t5563: add tests for http.emptyAuth with Negotiate
  doc: clarify http.emptyAuth values

 Documentation/config/http.adoc | 13 +++++-
 http.c                         | 32 ++++++++++++++-
 http.h                         |  6 +++
 remote-curl.c                  |  4 +-
 t/t5563-simple-http-auth.sh    | 74 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 5 files changed, 124 insertions(+), 5 deletions(-)

base-commit: 2b39a27d40682c09ac1c031f099ee602061597cd
Published-As: https://github.com/gitgitgadget/git/releases/tag/pr-2087%2Fmjcheetham%2Fspnego-fix-upstream-v2
Fetch-It-Via: git fetch https://github.com/gitgitgadget/git pr-2087/mjcheetham/spnego-fix-upstream-v2
Pull-Request: https://github.com/gitgitgadget/git/pull/2087

Range-diff vs v1:

 1:  49488cc7d4 = 1:  49488cc7d4 http: extract http_reauth_prepare() from retry paths
 2:  f175294459 = 2:  f175294459 http: attempt Negotiate auth in http.emptyAuth=auto mode
 3:  650acab79e = 3:  650acab79e t5563: add tests for http.emptyAuth with Negotiate
 -:  ---------- > 4:  e0f236767f doc: clarify http.emptyAuth values

-- 
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