Bypassing authentication for “Options request” (so

Question

This is in the context of Cross-origin resource sharing. For the preflight request, the server is not sending the headers set. When a valid cookie is not passed with the "Options request", the server in it's response is not sending the headers I set, however, it's sending "200 OK". I checked this with curl as can be seen below (obviously, I replaced my valid cookie with a dummy "xyzabcde" here)

The curl request WITHOUT cookie:

curl -H "Origin: app2_url"   -H "Access-Control-Request-Method: POST"   -H "Access-Control-Request-Headers: accept, origin, content-type"   -X OPTIONS --verbose   app1_url/jsonrpc.cgi

(sends below response...)

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Tue, 01 Oct 2013 11:37:36 GMT
Server: Apache
Expires: Tue, 01 Oct 2013 11:37:36 GMT
Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate
Pragma: no-cache
Expires: Tue, 01 Oct 2013 11:37:36 GMT
Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate
Pragma: no-cache
Content-Length: 4531
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8

with "-H Cookie:xyzabcde":

curl -H "Origin: app2_url"   -H "Access-Control-Request-Method: POST"   -H "Access-Control-Request-Headers: accept, origin, content-type" "-H Cookie:xyzabcde"  -X OPTIONS --verbose   app1_url/jsonrpc.cgi

(sends below response...)

HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden
Date: Wed, 02 Oct 2013 18:48:34 GMT
Server: Apache
X-frame-options: ALLOW-FROM app2_url
Access-Control-Allow-Credentials: true
Access-Control-Allow-Headers: accept, origin, content-type, Man, Messagetype, Soapaction, X-Requested-With
Access-Control-Allow-Methods: GET, POST, HEAD, PUT, OPTIONS
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: app2_url
Access-Control-Max-Age: 1800
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: application/json; charset=UTF-8

The apache config looks something like...

<VirtualHost *:443>
.
.
Header always set X-Frame-Options "ALLOW-FROM app2_url"
Header  always set  Access-Control-Allow-Credentials "true"
Header  always set  Access-Control-Allow-Headers    "accept, origin, content-type, Man, Messagetype, Soapaction, X-Requested-With"
Header  always set  Access-Control-Allow-Methods    "GET, POST, HEAD, PUT, OPTIONS"
Header  always set  Access-Control-Allow-Origin    "app2_url"
Header  always set  Access-Control-Max-Age  "1800"
.
.
.
<Directory /app1/dir/>      
    Options Includes FollowSymLinks ExecCGI MultiViews
    AllowOverride None
    Order allow,deny
    allow from all
    AuthType Net
    PubcookieInactiveExpire -1
    PubcookieAppID app1.company.com
    require valid-user
</Directory>
.
.
</VirtualHost>

How can I make all the headers be sent in response to unauthenticated requests? I guess, Options requests ideally are supposed to not require any authentication.

Answer 1

"LimitExcept" directive solved it. In fact, prior to posting the question I tried the directive, however the mistake earlier was including the first two lines ("Options Includes..." and "Alowoverride...") within the "LimitExcept" block.

<Directory /app1/dir/>      
  Options Includes FollowSymLinks ExecCGI MultiViews
  AllowOverride None
  <LimitExcept OPTIONS>
    Order allow,deny
    allow from all
    AuthType Net
    PubcookieInactiveExpire -1
    PubcookieAppID app1.company.com
    require valid-user
  </LimitExcept> #<- syntax error fixed.
</Directory>