tomcat security-constraint impact cache

Question

I have a problem in caching my application.

when this code is added to web.xml of tomcat :

<security-constraint>
    <web-resource-collection>
        <web-resource-name>HTTPSOnly</web-resource-name>
        <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
    </web-resource-collection>
    <user-data-constraint>
        <transport-guarantee>CONFIDENTIAL</transport-guarantee>
    </user-data-constraint>
</security-constraint>

I get this response :

---

Cache-Control   private
Date    Tue, 18 Feb 2014 01:18:17 GMT
Etag    W/"200-1391558564593"
Expires Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 WET
Server  Apache-Coyote/1.1

---

Without this code everything is fine :

Accept-Ranges   bytes
Cache-Control   max-age=604800
Content-Length  1496
Content-Type    text/css
Date    Tue, 18 Feb 2014 01:21:26 GMT
Etag    W/"1496-1391558561359"
Expires Tue, 25 Feb 2014 01:21:27 GMT
Last-Modified   Wed, 05 Feb 2014 00:02:41 GMT
Server  Apache-Coyote/1.1

Anyone can tell what cause the problem? and why this code change the cache-controle to private of my application. thanks a lot

Tomcat 7.0
JDK : 1.6

Answer 1

According to the Oracle Java EE 6 tutorial, specifying a user-data-constraint of "CONFIDENTIAL" is to be used

when the application requires that data be transmitted so as to prevent other entities from observing the contents of the transmission.

For HTTP responses, that would mean ensuring that no proxies/caches along the way, from the server back to the client, would be able to cache that response and provide to any other requesting client. Thus the use of:

Cache-Control: private

While you might be tempted to use "INTEGRAL" instead of "CONFIDENTIAL", the same tutorial points out that many Java EE servers treat these two values identically.

If your application needs to allow caching, I suspect that you would need to remove the <user-data-constraint> element from your web.xml file.

Hope this helps!

Answer 2

So I'm wondering how should I configure tomcat application to have automatic SSL redirect, but with preserved caching of static resources? I mean the application going completely through SSL, along with with static resources that should be cached.

It seems that after setting <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern> or even <url-pattern>/</url-pattern> I cannot declare different url-pattern with transport-guarantee NONE. Everything started from my root URL has now Cache-Control: private anyway.

But I found the solution, working at least in Tomcat 7.0.55. These headers are fortunately set before the whole request is processed, so you can catch them on very first application filter. When you will reset the response here, you can setup your own headers and overwrite existing:

@Override
public void doFilter(ServletRequest request, ServletResponse response, FilterChain chain) throws IOException, ServletException {
    response.reset();
    chain.doFilter(request, response);
}

Then you can configure for example tomcat ExpiresFilter as the second filter, and here you can configure your own caching setup.