Creating or editing Marketing Automation campaigns in Sitecore 9.0.1 is giving us "Authorization has been denied for this request." in Chrome

Question

We are using Sitecore 9.0.1 and Marketing Automation heavily on our current small project.

On one of our environments, we are getting

Authorization has been denied for this request.

when we are trying to create or update Marketing automation campaigns.

By latest testing this is happening only in Chrome 64.0.3282.186 (Official Build) (64-bit). On Firefox 58.0.2 (64-bit) everything is working as expected.

1. First popup is opened which is weird:

2. And then exception is shown:

I can see that request to {sitename}/sitecore/api/ma/plans/?cultureName=en is made when hitting "Save" button but ends with HTTP 403 Status Code.

This is the response:

{"message":"An error has occurred.","exceptionMessage":"The required anti-forgery cookie \u0022__RequestVerificationToken\u0022 is not present.","exceptionType":"System.Web.Mvc.HttpAntiForgeryException","stackTrace":" at System.Web.Helpers.AntiXsrf.TokenValidator.ValidateTokens(HttpContextBase httpContext, IIdentity identity, AntiForgeryToken sessionToken, AntiForgeryToken fieldToken)\r\n at System.Web.Helpers.AntiXsrf.AntiForgeryWorker.Validate(HttpContextBase httpContext, String cookieToken, String formToken)\r\n at Sitecore.Web.Http.Filters.ValidateHttpAntiForgeryTokenAttribute.OnAuthorization(HttpActionContext actionContext)"}

When I open {sitename}/sitecore/api/ma/plans/?cultureName=en in new tab, I can see results without any problem:

Has anyone experienced same behaviour? How can we fix this? We can see nothing extraordinary in logs.

Answer 1

There are generally two reasons why one would get the Required Anti-Forgery Cookie error message.

1. There is a client issue with your browser preventing the cookies from being read correctly.
2. The error message shown is actually a red herring, and there's an underlying error occurring. You will generally have to look through log files to find the underlying issue.

The majority of the time, it's due to the client browser. Clearing cookies at the domain level and reloading the page can generally fix this issue. This is most notably the issue when going into Experience Analytics and none of the graphs load.

You can also try a different browser and see if you are presented with the same error. Generally, a different browser will work. A recent update with Chrome has raised some minor issues with XHR requests resulting in this error message.