Will a 302 redirect maintain the referer string?

95
votes

I need to redirect the user from one page to another, but I need to maintain the original referer string. So, for example, if they start out on http://www.othersite.com/pageA.jsp, click a link that takes them to http://www.example.com/pageB.jsp, which then executes a 302 redirect to http://www.example.com/pageC.jsp, I need the referer string to contain http://www.othersite.com/pageA.jsp

Is this the normal behavior for a 302 redirect? Or would my original referer get dropped, in favor of http://www.example.com/pageB.jsp? That would not be desirable.

I don't know if it makes any difference, but I'm working in JSP, and I'm using response.sendRedirect() to execute the 302 redirect.

I should mention that I did an experiment with this, and it seems to have kept the original referer string (http://www.othersite.com/pageA.jsp) but I just wanted to make sure this was the normal default behavior, and not something weird on my end.

Although I'm currently using a 302 redirect, I could probably use a 301 redirect instead. Do you know if the behavior for 301 redirects is any more reliable?

4
jspredirectreferrerhttp-status-code-302http-referer
I just need the opposite. Do a server-side redirect changing the referrer on the redirect (so deleting the original referrer). Anyone? – cprcrack

4 Answers

125
votes

I don't know about the 302, but I tested the 301 on some browsers today, here the results:

SCENARIO: user clicks link on domainX that points to domainA. domainA does a 301 redirect to domainB.

  • IE8 referer when landing on domainB is: domainX (even when using InPrivate browsing and even when user opens link in new tab)
  • Safari4 referer when landing on domainB is: domainX (even when user opens link in new tab)
  • FF3.6.10 referer when landing on domainB is: domainX (even when user opens link in new tab)
  • Chrome5 referer when landing on domainB is: domainX (unless user opens links in new tab)
  • Chrome26 referer when landing on domainB is: domainX (even when the user opens links in new tab)
33
votes

Short answer is it's not specified in the relevant RFC 2616 http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec14.html#sec14.36 either for the Referer header or the 302 status code.

Your best bet is to do a test with several browsers and see if there's a consensus behaviour.

For full belt and braces, encode the original referrer in the redirect URL so you can guarantee to retrieve it.

12
votes

Good question. In this case, the sending of the referer depends entirely on the browser (because the browser is told to make another request to the new resource).

RFC 2616 remains silent about the issue:

The requested resource resides temporarily under a different URI. Since the redirection might be altered on occasion, the client SHOULD continue to use the Request-URI for future requests. This response is only cacheable if indicated by a Cache-Control or Expires header field.

I wouldn't trust the browser to send the right referer along. I bet there is at least one that sends something different than the others.

Workaround

If you can, why not add a ?override_referer=<old_url> parameter to the URL you redirect to, and parse that value instead of HTTP_REFERER.

That way you can be sure to always get the right result, and you're not losing anything in security: The referer can be faked either way.

8
votes

I had the oposite problem : I wanted that referer was "pageB" but none of curent browser procede this way...

So I tried with an HTML redirection on pageB (instead of 301 or 302 redirection) :

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url=pageC.jsp" />

And result was surprising :

  • Referer is pageB with Chrome
  • Referer is EMPTY with FireFox & IE !

Hope this can help