For a while now, Liferay has offered Basic authentication for various servlets (e.g., WebDAV, JSON, etc.).  For the most part, this has suited most of our needs.  However, recently, there have been some client applications that now require the more stringent Digest authentication system.  To support these requirements, digest authentication has been added to Liferay.

In particular, two WebDAV clients have added this requirement: Windows Vista and Windows 7.  Since most WebDAV clients support both basic and digest auth, this has been enabled by default.  You can only have one enabled at a time.  But you can switch WebDAV back to basic auth (or any other servlet to digest auth) in your tunnel-web/web.xml:

<filter>

    <filter-name>Secure WebDAV Servlet Filter</filter-name>

    <filter-class>com.liferay.portal.kernel.servlet.PortalClassLoaderFilter</filter-class>

    <init-param>

        <param-name>filter-class</param-name>

        <param-value>com.liferay.portal.servlet.filters.secure.SecureFilter</param-value>

    </init-param>

    <init-param>

        <!-- <param-name>basic_auth</param-name> -->

        <param-value>digest_auth</param-value>

        <param-value>true</param-value>

    </init-param>

    <init-param>

        <param-name>portal_property_prefix</param-name>

        <param-value>webdav.servlet.</param-value>

    </init-param>

</filter>

How does this change how we use WebDAV (or anything else with digest authentication).  For the average user, it does not change much.

What you need to know, however, is that if you are using a new installation of Liferay or just upgraded or something like that, you won't be able to log into WebDAV initially.  Rather, you must first login through the portal.  Why?  Because, the algorithm dictated by the RFC requires the server to have a hash based on your login credentials.  Since Liferay never stores a raw password, it can only create the hash based on credentials passed in when a user logs into the portal.  This also means any changes to a user's email address or screenname would require the user to relogin before they can login via WebDAV again (since we allow WebDAV credentials of all three types).

For Windows Vista and Windows 7 users... you still may not be able to use WebDAV to its full potential (at least on 6.0 CE GA3 and below).  Reason being, literally the day after we released GA3, I fixed a bug that only shows up in Windows Vista and Windows 7.  Basically, Microsoft changed their WebDAV client implementation to check certain things that it did not do in the past.  Therefore, while you are able to mount and use Liferay's WebDAV, you cannot do certain basic file system operations that are traditionally supported on WebDAV... unless you have the patch (which will definitely be in the next releases of CE and EE).

The basics of this information can be found in our wiki.