IFrame authentication

[Arno Richard]

dear community,

I'm creating a .Net web portal application that will host other web
applications. This is a C# web app with .Net Framework 1.1 SP1, running on
Windows 2003 servers. These other applications may require authentication or
not, and I may have control (=source code) over these applications or not.

These applications will be such as a Windows Sharepoint Services site, an
other web application in the same domain, or a 3rd party application on an
external domain requiring Basic authentication.
The web portal will work using forms authentication, and it will manage the
users from start to end; I mean, it will know the username & password for a
user for all the application he/she will need to access: Windows account for
Sharepoint, etc.


The idea is to have the 'hosted' application running in a IFrame, so that I
can keep my portal navigation around it.


The problem is how to automatically authenticate the user on the targetted
application, running in the IFrame. For basic authentication it used to be
possible to use the [url]http://username:password@site.address.tldn[/url], but that no
longer works as this has been patched away in IE6.


For a better user experience, I want to seamlessly authenticate my users
across all applications.... and can't get round to do it, and I'm wondering
now if that's possible at all, especially for the applications that I do not
control; a shame since I fully know the login credentials!

I've searched the various newsgroups, and there seems to be a lot of similar
request but couldn't find, or understand, a reply to my exact problem.

Can anybody help??? Thanks!

Best regards,
Arnaud Richard

[Jorge Matos]

Maybe this article might help:

[url]http://www.rassoc.com/gregr/weblog/stories/2002/07/09/webServicesSecurityHttpDigestAuthenticationWithout ActiveDirectory.html[/url]

"Arno Richard" wrote:

> dear community,
>
> I'm creating a .Net web portal application that will host other web
> applications. This is a C# web app with .Net Framework 1.1 SP1, running on
> Windows 2003 servers. These other applications may require authentication or
> not, and I may have control (=source code) over these applications or not.
>
> These applications will be such as a Windows Sharepoint Services site, an
> other web application in the same domain, or a 3rd party application on an
> external domain requiring Basic authentication.
> The web portal will work using forms authentication, and it will manage the
> users from start to end; I mean, it will know the username & password for a
> user for all the application he/she will need to access: Windows account for
> Sharepoint, etc.
>
>
> The idea is to have the 'hosted' application running in a IFrame, so that I
> can keep my portal navigation around it.
>
>
> The problem is how to automatically authenticate the user on the targetted
> application, running in the IFrame. For basic authentication it used to be
> possible to use the [url]http://username:password@site.address.tldn[/url], but that no
> longer works as this has been patched away in IE6.
>
>
> For a better user experience, I want to seamlessly authenticate my users
> across all applications.... and can't get round to do it, and I'm wondering
> now if that's possible at all, especially for the applications that I do not
> control; a shame since I fully know the login credentials!
>
> I've searched the various newsgroups, and there seems to be a lot of similar
> request but couldn't find, or understand, a reply to my exact problem.
>
> Can anybody help??? Thanks!
>
> Best regards,
> Arnaud Richard

[Arno Richard]

hi Jorge,

Thanks for taking the time to reply; the article you're pointing out is
really interesting and I may be able to use this technique in the future, but
unfortunately this doesn't solve my immediate problem.
What I really need to do is to pre-authenticate in the IFrame for an
application that I will switch to, and on which I don't have any control,
except that I know a valid username & password for it, and don't want the
login box to appear... and this external application may not necessarily be
written in .NET, can be anything.

FYI, there's a good trick at
[url]http://www.speerio.net/Default.aspx?tabid=758&ctl=ViewEntry&EntryID=6&mid =1443[/url]
if you want to seamlessly post some authentication information from an IFrame.


Arnaud

"Jorge Matos" wrote:

> Maybe this article might help:
>
> [url]http://www.rassoc.com/gregr/weblog/stories/2002/07/09/webServicesSecurityHttpDigestAuthenticationWithout ActiveDirectory.html[/url]
>
> "Arno Richard" wrote:

[ c l i p p e d]

> > The problem is how to automatically authenticate the user on the targetted
> > application, running in the IFrame. For basic authentication it used to be
> > possible to use the [url]http://username:password@site.address.tldn[/url], but that no
> > longer works as this has been patched away in IE6.
> >
> > For a better user experience, I want to seamlessly authenticate my users
> > across all applications.... and can't get round to do it, and I'm wondering
> > now if that's possible at all, especially for the applications that I do not
> > control; a shame since I fully know the login credentials!

[ c l i p p e d]