Autologin fails on flaky internet connection

[gene1wood]

Saw an interesting phenomenon today. I was using a cellular connection and the connection quality was poor (high latency and packet loss).

I went to an RP which redirected me to NLX which attempted autologin.

Autologin failed (despite me having a valid session) and I was taken to the NLX login.

Instead of logging in, I just tried to visit the RP again, went through autologin again and this time it worked.

This should be reproducible using netem or something that can simulate latency and packet loss.

[hidde]

Interesting! I tried with a couple of settings and managed to get this once. think what is going on here is simply that the auto-login call fails to be connected and its fallback comes into play (i.e. the NLX interactive login window).

Users could try and be auto-logged in again by refreshing, or by going to the RP as you did.

We have little control over the network with JavaScript. Service Workers give some control, but they won't help if we can't connect to the auth endpoint.

I think this works as expected.

[gene1wood]

What if instead NLX responds differently to these two cases

• a successful callback response from Auth0 which contains content indicating that the user is not logged in
• a failed callback response that either times out or is unparseable

The former should go to the login screen, the latter should either try again or show an error message saying that the user can't get to Auth0.