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Posted to users@tomcat.apache.org by danox <da...@cucurucho.org> on 2003/05/16 03:11:59 UTC

Authentication Practices

OK this is not a pure tomcat question, but hopefully it will be known by 
someone here.

I am working on moving a current application written for the Domino 
platform to a Tomcat platform, for various reasons, we have decided to 
do this piece by piece. Thus we will have a domino instance runing on 
one server and a tomcat instance running on another server.

The issue that I have is with authentication. I have been able to make 
tomcat authenticate from the same source as Domino, however when a 
person jumps from the domino server to the tomcat server, or vice versa, 
they must athenticate twice.

I need to find a way to make the browser send the same authentication 
details to both servers. I have been reading up on HTTP authentication, 
and I believe that this is possible to do with digest authentication (as 
opposed to basic), but my experiments with this have so far failed. Has 
anyone had any experiencing seting up tomcat to validate seamlessly with 
another type of server using digest authentication, or some other method?

Thanks in advance.

Danox


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Re: Authentication Practices

Posted by Gary Gwin <to...@cafesoft.com>.
Danox,

BASIC and DIGEST authentication are similar, the difference being that 
DIGEST requires the client to hash a password before sending it. BASIC 
does everything in cleartext. BASIC and DIGEST authenticate against an 
"origin server", and will not solve your multi-server single sign-on 
problem.

	http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2617.txt

One solution would be to use a proxy. For example, you could configure 
Apache on the Tomcat box with mod_jk, and use Apache security and the 
Apache Proxy feature to pass requests to the Domino server. In this 
configuration, you would loose access within Tomcat to the servlet 
security APIs (e.g., request.isUserInRole() . . .).

Gary

danox wrote:
> OK this is not a pure tomcat question, but hopefully it will be known by 
> someone here.
> 
> I am working on moving a current application written for the Domino 
> platform to a Tomcat platform, for various reasons, we have decided to 
> do this piece by piece. Thus we will have a domino instance runing on 
> one server and a tomcat instance running on another server.
> 
> The issue that I have is with authentication. I have been able to make 
> tomcat authenticate from the same source as Domino, however when a 
> person jumps from the domino server to the tomcat server, or vice versa, 
> they must athenticate twice.
> 
> I need to find a way to make the browser send the same authentication 
> details to both servers. I have been reading up on HTTP authentication, 
> and I believe that this is possible to do with digest authentication (as 
> opposed to basic), but my experiments with this have so far failed. Has 
> anyone had any experiencing seting up tomcat to validate seamlessly with 
> another type of server using digest authentication, or some other method?
> 
> Thanks in advance.
> 
> Danox
> 
> 
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
> To unsubscribe, e-mail: tomcat-user-unsubscribe@jakarta.apache.org
> For additional commands, e-mail: tomcat-user-help@jakarta.apache.org
> 

-- 

Gary Gwin
http://www.cafesoft.com

*****************************************************************
*                                                               *
*   The Cafesoft Access Management System, Cams, is security    *
*   software that provides single sign-on authentication and    *
*   centralized access control for Apache, Tomcat, and custom   *
*   resources.                                                  *
*                                                               *
*****************************************************************


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Re: Authentication Practices

Posted by pe...@kisstechnologies.co.uk.
You can pass authentication using the URL syntax if you want to use basic 
authentication - eg link across to the other server with the URL 
http://username:password@myhost/myapp/ - this would be one way to solve 
it.  Otherwise we have written custom authentication handlers which can 
serialise a user's bean on the session and pass that id across to another 
server for it to be deserialized.  This is managed using filters instead 
of the standard system
Pete

Kiss Technologies

http://www.kisstechnologies.co.uk/

Please note, we have moved!

4, Percy Street
London
W1T 1DF

New permanent phone numbers:

Phone 020 7692 9922
Fax 020 7692 9923




danox <da...@cucurucho.org>
16/05/2003 02:11
Please respond to "Tomcat Users List"
 
        To:     Tomcat Users List <to...@jakarta.apache.org>
        cc: 
        Subject:        Authentication Practices


OK this is not a pure tomcat question, but hopefully it will be known by 
someone here.

I am working on moving a current application written for the Domino 
platform to a Tomcat platform, for various reasons, we have decided to 
do this piece by piece. Thus we will have a domino instance runing on 
one server and a tomcat instance running on another server.

The issue that I have is with authentication. I have been able to make 
tomcat authenticate from the same source as Domino, however when a 
person jumps from the domino server to the tomcat server, or vice versa, 
they must athenticate twice.

I need to find a way to make the browser send the same authentication 
details to both servers. I have been reading up on HTTP authentication, 
and I believe that this is possible to do with digest authentication (as 
opposed to basic), but my experiments with this have so far failed. Has 
anyone had any experiencing seting up tomcat to validate seamlessly with 
another type of server using digest authentication, or some other method?

Thanks in advance.

Danox


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