CORS issue with Tomcat and Android Webview

Question

I am facing a strange problem with Tomcat 8 and CORS. I am developing a Hybrid web app using ionicframework, AngularJS, Cordova as front end and Tomcat 8 and Spring 3 as back-end.

For easy development I am testing the functionality in chrome , where things are working fine. I added CORS filter with standard configuration to allow CROSS ORIGIN requests from browser.

Today I converted my app into Android App and started making AJAX calls to tomcat server. To my surprise things stopped working . I debugged further and anomalies in the headers of browser and Android webview.

Browser sends 2 requests for same call OPTION and POST. But Android Webview only send POST request.

Browser Request Headers:

OPTION:

Remote Address:54.254.159.166:80
Request URL:http://medistreet.in/auth2
Request Method:OPTIONS
Status Code:200 OK
Request Headers 
OPTIONS /auth2 HTTP/1.1
Host: medistreet.in
Connection: keep-alive
Access-Control-Request-Method: POST
Origin: http://localhost
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/34.0.1847.116 Safari/537.36
Access-Control-Request-Headers: accept, content-type
Accept: */*
Referer: http://localhost/
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate,sdch
Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.8

POST:

Remote Address:54.254.159.166:80
Request URL:http://medistreet.in/auth2
Request Method:POST
Status Code:200 OK

Request Headers
Accept:application/json, text/plain, */*
Accept-Encoding:gzip,deflate,sdch
Accept-Language:en-US,en;q=0.8
Connection:keep-alive
Content-Length:39
Content-Type:application/json;charset=UTF-8
Host:medistreet.in
Origin:http://localhost
Referer:http://localhost/
User-Agent:Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/34.0.1847.116 Safari/537.36

Android Request Headers:

Request URL:http://medistreet.in/auth2
Request Method:POST
Status Code:403 Forbidden
Request Headers
POST http://medistreet.in/auth2 HTTP/1.1
Accept: application/json, text/plain, */*
Origin: file://
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 4.4.2; XT1033 Build/KXB20.25-1.31) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Chrome/30.0.0.0 Mobile Safari/537.36
Content-Type: application/json;charset=UTF-8

The difference here I see is with Number of headers and specially Origin Header which contains "file://". To overcome this I added more option is CORS filter:

<filter>
        <filter-name>CorsFilter</filter-name>
        <filter-class>org.apache.catalina.filters.CorsFilter</filter-class>
            <init-param>
            <param-name>cors.allowed.origins</param-name>
            <param-value>*</param-value>
        </init-param>
    </filter>
    <filter-mapping>
        <filter-name>CorsFilter</filter-name>
        <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
    </filter-mapping>

Another strange thing is that when we send the same Android request Headers from POSTMAN (chrome REST plugin) request is successful.

POSTMAN Headers:

Remote Address:54.254.159.166:80
Request URL:http://medistreet.in/auth2
Request Method:POST
Status Code:200 OK
Request Headers
Accept:application/json, text/plain, */*
Accept-Encoding:gzip,deflate,sdch
Accept-Language:en-US,en;q=0.8
Cache-Control:no-cache
Connection:keep-alive
Content-Length:39
Content-Type:application/json;charset=UTF-8
Cookie:fbm_464284963672217=base_domain=.medistreet.in; JSESSIONID=87435755F03D7B045DD6E33D1D16AC51; fbsr_464284963672217=dUjASqF-nWquTFPk_-5wAtI0jTImBNkVxglUT-gHNSw.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
Host:medistreet.in
Origin:chrome-extension://fdmmgilgnpjigdojojpjoooidkmcomcm
User-Agent:Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/34.0.1847.116 Safari/537.36

After this also there is no solution to the problem . I suspect that Android Webview is not sending something which Tomcat is rejecting.

Any help will highly be appreciated.

Answer 1

I did more research on this and figure out the issue.If you see the headers from Android and look into Origin Header.

Origin: file://

Tomcat CORS filter tries to validate the URI in Origin header and considers "file://" as an invalid URI and returns back 403.

     */
    protected static boolean isValidOrigin(String origin) {
       /* // Checks for encoded characters. Helps prevent CRLF injection.
        if (origin.contains("%")) {
            return false;
        }

        URI originURI;

        try {
            originURI = new URI(origin);
        } catch (URISyntaxException e) {
            return false;
        }
        // If scheme for URI is null, return false. Return true otherwise.
        return originURI.getScheme() != null;
*/
        return true;
    }

I need to dig more on why Android is sending the incorrect URI.