Not sure this is a bug but nobody is replying me on user mailing list, so I filled it here.

I've been trying digest authentication for a while now and just noticed a strange behavior when working on cluster.

Actually I've 2 apaches behind a load balancer (so serving same domain), and I noticed that an authentication sent to apache A is valid when sent on apache B.
Let me explain:

1. My client connects to Apache A, it receives an authentication required with a nonce (valid for 1h).
2. My client authenticate itself on Apache A using the received nonce
3. Few minutes later, the same client issues another request directly using the nonce already received, but the request goes on Apache B ---> No problem the nonce is valid !

Looking at the code, it seems everything is done to prevent this by using a randomly generated secret in the nonce hash.

However, debugging a bit it seems the nonce_ctx initialization is performed BEFORE the secret initialization, so it is always initialized with the same empty secret and generated nonce are valid everywhere.

So basically, in mod_auth_digest.c, set_realm function is called before initialize_secret.

Actually this behavior fit my needs for now but I wanted to know if it is a desired behavior, if it is a bug and if it might change in future version ?

I checked this on apache 2.4.2 and 2.4.4 under unbuntu.