I got it to work, but the solution is a bit complex, so bear with me.
What's happening
As it is, Internet Explorer gives lower level of trust to IFRAME pages (IE calls this "third-party" content). If the page inside the IFRAME doesn't have a Privacy Policy, its cookies are blocked (which is indicated by the eye icon in status bar, when you click on it, it shows you a list of blocked URLs).
(source: piskvor.org)
In this case, when cookies are blocked, session identifier is not sent, and the target script throws a 'session not found' error.
(I've tried setting the session identifier into the form and loading it from POST variables. This would have worked, but for political reasons I couldn't do that.)
It is possible to make the page inside the IFRAME more trusted: if the inner page sends a P3P header with a privacy policy that is acceptable to IE, the cookies will be accepted.
How to solve it
Create a p3p policy
A good starting point is the W3C tutorial. I've gone through it, downloaded the IBM Privacy Policy Editor and there I created a representation of the privacy policy and gave it a name to reference it by (here it was policy1).
NOTE: at this point, you actually need to find out if your site has a privacy policy, and if not, create it - whether it collects user data, what kind of data, what it does with it, who has access to it, etc. You need to find this information and think about it. Just slapping together a few tags will not cut it. This step cannot be done purely in software, and may be highly political (e.g. "should we sell our click statistics?").
(e.g. "the site is operated by ACME Ltd., it uses anonymous per-session identifiers for its operation, collects user data only if explicitly permitted and only for the following purposes, the data is stored only as long as necessary, only our company has access to it, etc. etc.").
(When editing with this tool, it's possible to view errors/omissions in the policy. Also very useful is the tab "HTML Policy": at the bottom, it has a "Policy Evaluation" - a quick check if the policy will be blocked by IE's default settings)
The Editor exports to a .p3p file, which is an XML representation of the above policy. Also, it can export a "compact version" of this policy.
Link to the policy
Then a Policy Reference file (http://example.com/w3c/p3p.xml) was needed (an index of privacy policies the site uses):
<META>
<POLICY-REFERENCES>
<POLICY-REF about="/w3c/example-com.p3p#policy1">
<INCLUDE>/</INCLUDE>
<COOKIE-INCLUDE/>
</POLICY-REF>
</POLICY-REFERENCES>
</META>
The <INCLUDE> shows all URIs that will use this policy (in my case, the whole site). The policy file I've exported from the Editor was uploaded to http://example.com/w3c/example-com.p3p
Send the compact header with responses
I've set the webserver at example.com to send the compact header with responses, like this:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
P3P: policyref="/w3c/p3p.xml", CP="IDC DSP COR IVAi IVDi OUR TST"
// ... other headers and content
policyref is a relative URI to the Policy Reference file (which in turn references the privacy policies), CP is the compact policy representation. Note that the combination of P3P headers in the example may not be applicable on your specific website; your P3P headers MUST truthfully represent your own privacy policy!
Profit!
In this configuration, the Evil Eye does not appear, the cookies are saved even in the IFRAME, and the application works.
Edit: What NOT to do, unless you like defending from lawsuits
Several people have suggested "just slap some tags into your P3P header, until the Evil Eye gives up".
The tags are not only a bunch of bits, they have real world meanings, and their use gives you real world responsibilities!
For example, pretending that you never collect user data might make the browser happy, but if you actually collect user data, the P3P is conflicting with reality. Plain and simple, you are purposefully lying to your users, and that might be criminal behavior in some countries. As in, "go to jail, do not collect $200".
A few examples (see p3pwriter for the full set of tags):
- NOI : "Web Site does not collected identified data." (as soon as there's any customization, a login, or any data collection (***** Analytics, anyone?), you must acknowledge it in your P3P)
- STP: Information is retained to meet the stated purpose. This requires information to be discarded at the earliest time possible. Sites MUST have a retention policy that establishes a destruction time table. The retention policy MUST be included in or linked from the site's human-readable privacy policy." (so if you send
STP but don't have a retention policy, you may be committing fraud. How cool is that? Not at all.)
I'm not a lawyer, but I'm not willing to go to court to see if the P3P header is really legally binding or if you can promise your users anything without actually willing to honor your promises.
To be RESTful, each HTTP request should carry enough information by itself for its recipient to process it to be in complete harmony with the stateless nature of HTTP.
Okay, I get that HTTP authentication
is done automatically on every message
- but how?
Yes, the username and password is sent with every request. The common methods to do so are basic access authentication and digest access authentication. And yes, an eavesdropper can capture the user's credentials. One would thus encrypt all data sent and received using Transport Layer Security (TLS).
Would it be bad to have a REST
service, say, /session, that accepts a
GET request, where you'd pass in a
username/password as part of the
request, and returns a session token
if the authentication was successful,
that could be then passed along with
subsequent requests? Does that make
sense from a REST point of view, or is
that missing the point?
This would not be RESTful since it carries state but it is however quite common since it's a convenience for users; a user does not have to login each time.
What you describe in a "session token" is commonly referred to as a login cookie. For instance, if you try to login to your Yahoo! account there's a checkbox that says "keep me logged in for 2 weeks". This is essentially saying (in your words) "keep my session token alive for 2 weeks if I login successfully." Web browsers will send such login cookies (and possibly others) with each HTTP request you ask it to make for you.
Best Answer
First of all, REST is not a religion and should not be approached as such. While there are advantages to RESTful services, you should only follow the tenets of REST as far as they make sense for your application.
That said, authentication and client side state do not violate REST principles. While REST requires that state transitions be stateless, this is referring to the server itself. At the heart, all of REST is about documents. The idea behind statelessness is that the SERVER is stateless, not the clients. Any client issuing an identical request (same headers, cookies, URI, etc) should be taken to the same place in the application. If the website stored the current location of the user and managed navigation by updating this server side navigation variable, then REST would be violated. Another client with identical request information would be taken to a different location depending on the server-side state.
Google's web services are a fantastic example of a RESTful system. They require an authentication header with the user's authentication key to be passed upon every request. This does violate REST principles slightly, because the server is tracking the state of the authentication key. The state of this key must be maintained and it has some sort of expiration date/time after which it no longer grants access. However, as I mentioned at the top of my post, sacrifices must be made to allow an application to actually work. That said, authentication tokens must be stored in a way that allows all possible clients to continue granting access during their valid times. If one server is managing the state of the authentication key to the point that another load balanced server cannot take over fulfilling requests based on that key, you have started to really violate the principles of REST. Google's services ensure that, at any time, you can take an authentication token you were using on your phone against load balance server A and hit load balance server B from your desktop and still have access to the system and be directed to the same resources if the requests were identical.
What it all boils down to is that you need to make sure your authentication tokens are validated against a backing store of some sort (database, cache, whatever) to ensure that you preserve as many of the REST properties as possible.
I hope all of that made sense. You should also check out the Constraints section of the wikipedia article on Representational State Transfer if you haven't already. It is particularly enlightening with regard to what the tenets of REST are actually arguing for and why.