Session Cookies and IE 8
I recently built a simple web-app deployed over Tomcat. The app uses pretty standard session based security where a user who has logged in is given a session.
Sessions work fine in Firefox and Chrome, but require the use of jsessionid in the URL for IE (tested 7 & 8), set to medium privacy. In IE 8, I tried to override cookie handling, setting "Allow all 3rd party cookies" and "Allow all session cookies"- no dice. However, when I run Tomcat on my local machine, IE accepts the cookie, and sessions work just fine.
And now, for the HTTP headers.
From Chrome, a logged in user gets a session
GET http://devl:8080/testing/ HTTP/1.1
Host: devl:8080
Connection: keep-alive
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/532.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/4.1.249.1036 Safari/532.5
Accept: application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate,sdch
Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.8
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.3
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1
P3P: CP="NON CURa ADMa DEVa TAIa OUR BUS IND UNI COM NAV INT STA"
Set-Cookie: JSESSIONID=9280023BCE2046F32B13C89130CBC397; Path=/testing
Content-Type: text/html;charset=UTF-8
Content-Language: en-US
Content-Length: 2450
Date: Fri, 26 Mar 2010 14:14:40 GMT
GET http://devl:8080/testing/logout HTTP/1.1
Host: devl:8080
Connection: keep-alive
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/532.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/4.1.249.1036 Safari/532.5
Referer: http://devl:8080/testing/
Accept: application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate,sdch
Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.8
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.3
Cookie: JSESSIONID=9280023BCE2046F32B13C89130CBC397
...
From IE 8, with standard medium level security and privacy-
GET http://devl:8080/testing/ HTTP/1.1
Accept: application/x-ms-application, image/jpeg, application/xaml+xml, image/gif, image/pjpeg, application/x-ms-xbap, */*
Accept-Language: en-US
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; Trident/4.0; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; SLCC2; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; Media Center PC 6.0; MDDC; Tablet PC 2.0)
UA-CPU: AMD64
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Host: devl:8080
Connection: Keep-Alive
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1
P3P: CP="NON CURa ADMa DEVa TAIa OUR BUS IND UNI COM NAV INT STA"
Set-Cookie: JSESSIONID=192999F922D6E9C868314452726764BA; Path=/testing
Content-Type: text/html;charset=UTF-8
Content-Language: en-US
Content-Length: 2450
Date: Fri, 26 Mar 2010 14:32:34 GMT
GET http://devl:8080/testing/logout HTTP/1.1
Accept: application/x-ms-application, image/jpeg, application/xaml+xml, image/gif, image/pjpeg, application/x-ms-xbap, */*
Referer: http://devl:8080/testing/;jsessionid=6371A83EFE39A46997544F9146AA5CEA
Accept-Language: en-US
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; Trident/4.0; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; SLCC2; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; Media Center PC 6.0; MDDC; Tablet PC 2.0)
UA-CPU: AMD64
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Connection: Keep-Alive
Host: devl:8080
...
I thought it might be P3P, but on adding a compact policy, nothing changes. This is the standard Tomcat session, so I'm really surprised I haven't been able to find other people with the same problem so far. Anyone have any ideas?
EDIT 4/3/2010 -
Sorry if I didn't make this clear- I've tried from multiple other instances of IE - co-workers down the hall, etc.
EDIT 4/3/2010 -
I've also tried turning on prompting for all cookies, but I don't get a prompt. Setting the domain in the "Set-Cookie" header using Fiddler didn't make a difference, either.
Answer
I ran into this exact problem, dug around for a while, and found this:
http://forums.iis.net/p/1147938/1879164.aspx
which says that domain names that have underscores in them cause problems with Windows Server, tomcat and IE
not sure if this fixes your problem (and at this point, you probably don't care) but maybe the next person who comes along can gain some value from it.