Brave-browser: TOO MANY REDIRECTS caused by Brave's user agent behavior

[mikegrima]

Description

Hello:

With recent Brave releases, there was a change to the user-agent behavior that breaks authentication on sites that utilize zmartzone/mod_auth_openidc. Effectively, Brave now randomizes the number of Braves in the user-agent, which some authentication systems rely on.

The issue is documented in more detail here: https://github.com/zmartzone/mod_auth_openidc/issues/452

Can an option be added to disable this behavior? This currently breaks Brave for use on our internal sites.

Steps to Reproduce

1. Go to an internal authenticated site that uses zmartzone/mod_auth_openidc
2. ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS

Brave version (brave://version info)

Brave | 1.0.0 Chromium: 78.0.3904.97 (Official Build) (64-bit)
Revision | 021b9028c246d820be17a10e5b393ee90f41375e-refs/branch-heads/3904@{#859}

[fmarier]

Is there a public test site that can be used to reproduce the problem?

[mikegrima]

That's a great question. I have not encountered any issues with public sites -- only our internal sites.

@drkancharla is there an easy way to demonstrate this behavior -- like a docker image that could be set up to make it easy to test?

[bsclifton]

Definitely a bug with the custom user-agent logic we have:
https://github.com/brave/brave-core/blob/66ceaf3491778f7d9a62f215c8fb47b318c9b181/browser/net/brave_site_hacks_network_delegate_helper.cc#L62-L76

Appears it will always do a substitution, leading to multiple Brave strings in the UA

[bsclifton]

Marking as QA/No since I don't believe there are steps to reproduce. But we have an automated test in https://github.com/brave/brave-core/pull/4143

[iefremov]

I've reproduced on netflix.com - it redirected me to the russian site :) After the redirect "Brave Brave" is visible in User-Agent in devtools

[mikegrima]

@bsclifton I'm happy to test this with a pre-release version.

[mikegrima]

Confirmed that the nightly works 🎉

Thank you all for getting this done!

[bsclifton]

@mikegrima awesome! Thanks for confirming 😄👍

[mikegrima]

Is it possible to move this to an earlier release? I would really like to start using Brave at work again.

I can confirm that it's working perfectly in the 1.4.x Dev release.