i've recently been working on a digest auth module for nginx and have
some functional (but untested) code posted here:
https://github.com/samizdatco/ngx-http-auth-digest

for the most part it seems to obey the RFC and is compatible with the
browsers i've tried, so i'm confident that with a bit more work it
could actually be usable in practice.

however i've run into a few roadblocks along the way, mostly relating
to saving state across requests and i wondered if anyone here could
point me in the right direction as i try to make it work in a way that
doesn't kill performance with mutex contention or i/o blocking.

the current implementation stores state in a shm-segment rbtree. this
works well so long as the amount of state doesn't exceed what was
allocated at config time, but that's hard to guarantee under high load
(and given the potentially long lifetimes for the tree nodes). is it
possible to grow the shm size after config? and if not, is this a sign
that i should actually be using the file system to cache this data
instead?

i'm also a little confused as to how the module should schedule a
recurring node-expiration callback that purges stale entries from the
rbtree. at the moment the purge function is called at the top of every
request, which feels like the wrongest possible way to do it. i've
seen mention of the cleanup hook attached to the request's pool. is
this a more appropriate place to run or are there other problems
associated with that?

these and other questions can be found here:
https://github.com/samizdatco/ngx-http-auth-digest/issues

personally i'm looking forward to a day where i no longer need apache
if i want to use digest authentication, so i'd love to get this module
to a reasonably trustworthy state. any feedback or guidance (or code!)
you could offer would be a great help.

thanks,
christian

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