I don’t remember, exactly. Long time ago (I stepped away from that project many years ago).
I just remember the auth headers never showing up in the $_SERVER global (it was a PHP app). This was what I was told was the issue. They made it sound like it was well-known.
This is because of a deeply annoying default in Apache, where for "security reasons" the underlying script doesn't get to see auth details that might already be handled by Apache. At some point they added the CGIPassAuth directive[1] but all kinds of other workarounds are floating around on the internet.