Why doesn't the browser reuse the authorization headers after an authenticated XMLHttpRequest?

Question

I'm developing Single Page App using Angular. The backend exposes REST services that require Basic authentication. Getting index.html or any of the scripts does not require authentication.

I have an odd situation where one of my view has a <img> where the src is the url of a REST API that requires authentication. The <img> is processed by the browser and I have no chance to set the authorization header for GET request it makes. That causes the browser to prompt for credentials.

I attempted to fix this by doing this:

1. Leave img src empty in the source
2. At "document ready", make an XMLHttpRequest to a service (/api/login) with the Authorization header, just to cause the authentication to occur.
3. Upon completing that call, set the img src attribute, thinking that by then, the browser would know to include the Authorization header in subsequent requests...

...but it doesn't. The request for the image goes out without the headers. If I enter the credentials, then all other images on the page are right. (I've also tried and Angular's ng-src but that produced the same result)

I have two questions:

1. Why didn't the browser (IE10) include the headers in all requests after a successful XMLHttpRequest?
2. What can I do to work around this problem?

---

@bergi asked for requests' details. Here they are.

Request to /api/login

GET https://myserver/dev30281_WebServices/api/login HTTP/1.1
Accept: */*
Authorization: Basic <header here>
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.2; WOW64; Trident/6.0; .NET4.0E; .NET4.0C; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.30729)
Connection: Keep-Alive

Response (/api/login)

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Cache-Control: no-cache
Pragma: no-cache
Content-Length: 4
Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8
Expires: -1
Server: Microsoft-IIS/8.0
X-AspNet-Version: 4.0.30319
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
Date: Fri, 20 Dec 2013 14:44:52 GMT

Request to /user/picture/2218:

GET https://myserver/dev30281_WebServices/api/user/picture/2218 HTTP/1.1
Accept: */*
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.2; WOW64; Trident/6.0; .NET4.0E; .NET4.0C; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.30729)
Connection: Keep-Alive

And then the web browser prompts for credentials. If I enter them, I get this response:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Cache-Control: public, max-age=60
Content-Length: 3119
Content-Type: image/png
Server: Microsoft-IIS/8.0
X-AspNet-Version: 4.0.30319
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
Date: Fri, 20 Dec 2013 14:50:17 GMT

Answer 1

Basic idea

Load the images via JavaScript and display them on the site. The advantage is that the authentication credentials will never find their way into the HTML. They will resist at the JavaScript side.

Step 1: load the image data via JS

That's basic AJAX functionality (see also XMLHttpRequest::open(method, uri, async, user, pw)):

var xhr = new XMLHttpRequest();
xhr.open("GET", "your-server-path-to-image", true, "username", "password");

xhr.onload = function(evt) {
  if (this.status == 200) {
    // ...
  }
};

Step 2: format the data

Now, how can we display the image data? When using HTML, one would normally assign an URI to the src attribute of the image element. We can apply the same principle here except for the fact that we use data URIs instead of 'normal' http(s):// derivates.

xhr.onload = function(evt) {
  if (this.status == 200) {
    var b64 = utf8_to_b64(this.responseText);
    var dataUri = 'data:image/png;base64,' + b64; // Assuming a PNG image

    myImgElement.src = dataUri;
  }
};

// From MDN:
// https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/window.btoa
function utf8_to_b64( str ) {
    return window.btoa(unescape(encodeURIComponent( str )));
}

Canvas

There is also another option which consists in painting the loaded data in a <canvas> field. This way, the user won't be able to right-click the image (the area where the canvas is positioned) as opposed to the <img> and data URIs where the user will see a long data URI when viewing the image properties panel.