ASP.NET MVC 3 - Redirect Loop Only on Certain Browsers

Question

All,

I am seeing a redirect loop occur when someone tries authenticating on IE 11 and Chrome for iPad. Very strange that a redirect loop is browser-specific but that appears to be the case.

We authenticate users with the .NET forms authentication which employs cookies. This site is running on .NET Framework 4.0

Basically our authentication process involves 3 calls to:

Redirect(url)

and has been working for the most part for quite a while.

Can this be an issue with the browser definition file not having IE 11 and some of these other tablet browsers?

I really have no idea what would cause a redirect loop in certain browsers.

Any thoughts and/or suggestions are enthusiastically welcomed!

Thanks

Answer 1

Have you setup forms in web.config to enforce the use of cookies? (cookieless="UseCookies")

I have seen cases where outdated browser definitions caused ASP.NET to believe that cookies cannot be used. You can easily test for that in a simple application. One time even IE10 wasn't supported (because ASP.NET only tested for IE1..IE9), but there was a Windows Update for that.

Cookies may also be rejected for several browser policies, for example by invalid hostnames, for example if it contains an underscore.