AWS S3 with Basic Auth with Lambda gives AccessDenied when refreshing the page

Question

I have setup S3 with CloudFront to serve static site behind Basic HTTP authentication, similar to this setup here: Basic User Authentication for Static Site using AWS & S3 Bucket

Everything seems to work fine, but for some reason when I do a refresh of the site, CloudFront responds with 403 AccessDenied. This is also happening only when navigating somewhere to the site, like example.com/somepath and refreshing the site. If I stay at the root level: example.com and hit that refresh button everything seems to work fine.

I have configured routing on react app, so just to be clear that when navigating site via application links all seems to be normal. Only refreshing the page causes above issue. I have static website hosting disabled on S3 as I don't want anyone accessing my S3 files via S3 links directly.

I have added a custom Error Page to the CloudFront distribution. For all 403 errors it should fetch root from origin / and return 200 HTTP status code.

Any ideas where to look for the issue?

Answer 1

The issue was with the incorrectly setup CloudFront distribution error page. Having error page configured for the 403 error to navigate to the S3 bucket root with the HTTP status code 200 solves the issue. It just took some time to take it into effect thus causing confusion.