Modal Apache htaccess? - apache

Apache realm auth is great for quick and dirty site acl's. Can one do realm authentication with a modal window instead of the usual ugly native one? I know there are other solutions, like CAS, etc. But Apache is always there (for the most part) and .htaccess is simple quick and easy

As a short answer no; the ugly native window is not something coming from Apache, but from your browser.
When you ask access to a resource, basically answers with a response with status 401 (Unauthorized); the browser shows the usual modal dialog, asking for username and password; once you provide them, the browser tries again adding an Authentication: header with the username/password provided. If you can be authorized, fine, otherwise you've another 401, and the browser asks for the password again.

Simple answer: no.
This "ugly native window" is the kind of dialog your web browser shows when it encounters HTTP authentication as defined in RFC 2617. This has nothing to do with Apache httpd, the dialog will look the same in your web browser, no matter which web server (Apache httpd, nginx, lighttpd, IIS, Hiawatha, fnord, gatling, …) generated the WWW-Authenticate header.

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Windows Authentication issue with .Net Reverse Proxy using IIS custom HTTP module

We use a custom HTTP module in IIS as a reverse proxy for web applications. Generally this works well and has done for some time, but we've come across an issue with Windows Authentication (WA). We're using IE 11, IIS 10 and Server 2016.
When accessing the target site directly, WA works fine - we get a browser login dialog when the initial HTML page is requested and the subsequent requests (CSS, JS, etc) go through fine.
When accessing via our proxy, the same (correct behaviour) happens for the initial html page, the first CSS/JS request authenticates ok too, but the subsequent ones cause a browser login to popup.
What seems to happen on the 'bad' requests (i,.e. those that cause the login dialog) is:
1) Browser decides it needs to authenticate, so sends an Authorization header (Negotiate, with an NTLM token)
2) Server responds (401) with a WWW-Authenticate: Negotiate response with a full NTLM token
3) Browser re-requests with an Authorization header (Negotiate, with a full NTLM token)
4) Server responds (401) with a WWW-Authenticate: Negotiate (with no token), which causes the browser to show the login dialog
5) With login credentials entered, Browser sends the same request as in (1) - identical NTLM token, server responds as in (2), Browser re-requests as in (3), but this time it works!
We've set up a test web site with one html page, requesting 3 JS and 2 CSS files to replicate this. On our test server we've got two sites, one using our reverse proxy and one using ARR. The ARR site works fine. Also, since step (5) above works, we believe that the proxy pass-through is fundamentally working, i.e. NTLM tokens are not being messed up by dodgy encoding, etc.
One thing that does work, is that if we use Fiddler and put breakpoints on each request, we're able to hold back on the 5 sub-requests (JS & CSS files), letting one go through at a time. If we let each sequence (i.e. NTLM token exchange for each URL/file, through to the 200 response), then it works. This made us think that there is some inter-leaving effect (e.g. shared memory corruption) in our proxy, this is still a possibility.
So, we put code at the start of BeginRequest and end of EndRequest with a Synclock and a shared var to store the Path (AppRelativeCurrentExecutionFilePath). This was for our code to 'Single Thread' each of these request/exchanges. This does what we expected, i.e. only allowing one auth exchange to happen and resulting in a 200 before allowing the next. However, we still have the same problem of the server rejecting the first exchange. So, does this indicate something happening in/before BeginRequest, where if we hold the requests back in Fiddler then they work, but not if we do it in our http module?
Or is there some sort of timing issue where the manual breakpoints in Fiddler also mean we’re doing it at ‘human’ speed and therefore allowing things to work better?
One difference we can see is the ‘Connection: Keep-Alive’. That header is in the request from the browser to our proxy site, but not passed from our proxy to the base site, yet the ARR site does pass that through... It’s all using HTTP 1.1. and so we can't find a way to set Keep-Alive on our outgoing request - could this be it?
Regarding 'things to try', we think we've eliminated things like having the site in the Intranet Zone for IE by having the ARR site work ok, and having the same IE settings for that site. Clearly, something is not right, so we could have missed something here!
In short, we've been working on this for days, and have tried most of what we can find on SO and elsewhere, but can't figure out what the heck is going on.
Any suggestions - let me know if you want any further info. All help will be very gratefully received!

How to understand the Google Redirect URI correctly?

From Google Developer Console page, it explains the meaning of "Google Redirect URI" is :
Determines where the response is sent. The value of this parameter
must exactly match one of the values registered in the APIs Console
(including the http or https schemes, case, and trailing '/').
Not sure, whether this explanation is same as my think or not:
On my app (web application), it allow user to sign-in via Google (Assume, I registered a Google project with ClientID/secrete configured on my web-app, and on Google COnsole page the redirectURI is "http://bbc.co.uk" ).
After I login to Google successfully by my Google account, my Web-app login page will be redirected to "http://bbc.co.uk" as on Google RedirectURI ?
That last sentence is a bit ambiguous. A better description is:
After I login to my Google Account successfully with my Google
credentials, Google will redirect my browser back to
Redirect URI http://bbc.co.uk that is registered for the web app in the Google > API Console.
Just to be sure: this means that the Redirect URI should be part of your web app. It is not actually Google's Redirect URI but it is the Redirect URI that you've configured in the Google API Console for your web app.
Let me see if i cant explain this in a different way.
What would happen if you didn't have a redirect URI?
If you go to the Developer console and create a Client ID for native application by default the redirect URI
This will redirect the Authentication back to where ever it was request from. In the case of native installed applications this is needed because there is no way to know where the user is that has installed the application.
Lets look at this in action
Request authentication:
https://accounts.google.com/o/oauth2/auth?client_id={clientid}.apps.googleusercontent.com&redirect_uri=urn:ietf:wg:oauth:2.0:oob&scope=https://www.googleapis.com/auth/analytics.readonly&response_type=code
If you place the above line in a web browser the user will see something like this
Assuming they select ok then they get this displayed back at them.
That is the Authentication code, not to be confused with the access token. This is just the first step. Once your application has the Authentication code it can then exchanged that for a refresh token and a access token. Most client library handle this step internally. You and your users never see this Authentication code.
Back Redirect URI:
In the case if a web application your web application needs to be able to get a hold of that authentication code. Now I probably shouldn't be telling you this but you could just use a native application client in your web application and it will work. Why because the authentication server will just return the Authentication code back to where ever it was that requested it. For security reasons this is probably a bad practice.
So what do you need to place in the redirect uri. It is the file that you have ready to handle this authentication code. Normally its just the same as the login page, but you can have several. Just put each of them on separate lines.
http://localhost/login.php
http://www.daimto.com/login.php
I like to do this because then it works when i am testing locally vs when its up on the server.
I think the wording "Determines where the response is sent" confuses a lot of beginners as it implies that Google will somehow call that URL directly. Then the word "redirect" leads people to confuse the URL with the page of the app that the user will get to once he's authenticated.
http://bbc.co.uk is definitely NOT the redirect URL. A redirect URL would normally look like https://myapp.com/servlet_or_php_that_i_wrote_to_process_tokens.php
Google will "call" servlet_or_php_that_i_wrote_to_process_tokens.php by redirecting the browser to it. Once servlet_or_php_that_i_wrote_to_process_tokens.php as done whatever is needed with the token, it will then issue its own redirect to (say) bbc.co.uk

SWT Browser Plugin does not promt for proxy authentication

I have successfully configured my SWT Browser application to use the proxy by setting VM arguments -Dnetwork.proxy_host and -Dnetwork.proxy_port to the according values.
However the proxy needs authentication, but the username / password prompt does not open. Futhermore when registering an authentication listener, the listener is never triggered.
The problems occured with a Linux Debian 64 Bit distribution. When compiling the same application for windows, all works fine, i.e. the password promt opens. The SWT Browser is configured to use MOZILLA, not WEBKIT. Unfortunatelly I cannot test with WEBKIT as I am limited to a given environment.
Temp solution: When starting the Linux Mozilla Browser, the prompt comes up. If entering there correct values and afterwards starting the SWT Browser application, then no authentication is needed at all and internet access is possible. But this is not a good solution.
When I register a location listener with "addLocationListener" to look whats going on with url calls, then I can see that the initial url (for example www.google.de) results to call a certain http site of the proxy server. And this http site is a redirect to a https site of the proxy. Then the https site results in calling the http redirect page again. This is then an endless loop.
I would guess that somewhere in the JAVA code of the SWT Browser class there is a routine that calls setUrl with those pages (what results in an
endless loop) and skip to call any authentication listener for some reason.
Maybe someone has an idea whats going wrong in this authentication process?
I have no solution but a hint: I'm not sure what you mean by "Linux Mozilla Browser" - I know Firefox and Xulrunner. But your workaround suggests that profile information is shared somehow and that shouldn't happen.
I tried to find some information how to define the profile (where the web browser keeps its cache, config, SSL certificates, plugins, ...) but to no avail.
This entry in the FAQ shows how to set the proxy host: How do I set a proxy for the Browser to use?
Try to find a way to add the user/password information into the request sent to the proxy server. If that fails, create a local proxy which connects to the real proxy as upstream and which can authenticate itself.
Looking at the bug database, there is no support for Browser profiles: Flexible Mozilla profile support - new API request

http://dev.twitter.com/ redirects to http://twitter.com/

I am trying to access my Twitter API but the call is failing due to the redirect. Does anybody know why this is happening and or how I can fix it? Yes, I am signed in.
Are you using the "Use HTTPS" on Chrome, or a similar extension?
For me, it redirects http://dev.twitter.com to https://dev.twitter.com, which in turn redirects to https://twitter.com
Ideally, the extension would offer more control in how it matches domains. Meanwhile, a quick workaround is to open an incognito window, for which extensions are disabled, and view dev.twitter.com there.

Are there any samples/tutorials which tells how to call servlets on J2EE server from iPhone app?

Sorry for posting basic question but please give me your advise.
I have to write iOS application which communicates with web application deployed on Tomcat server.
The web application requires client-app to call the "logon" servlet with username and password to get JSESSIONID. Once client get JSESSIONID, the web application allows to invoke other servlets.
But I couldn't figure out how to manage the session to invoke these servlets.
Would you please introduce me the examples/tutorials to learn how to invoke these kind of servlets?
Thank you in advance.
Here's a decent example of making an http request from iOS:
iOS: How to make a secure HTTPS connection to pass credentials?
There's nothing magic about making the call to a j2ee tomcat server - it's just an HTTP request, so any way you can make an HTTP request will work for you.
Maybe this one too:
Can I make POST or GET requests from an iphone application?
edit: ahh, looks like this is the one you want:
http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/URLLoadingSystem/Tasks/UsingNSURLConnection.html
The JSESSIONID is nothing special. If your application is set up to handle cookies coming back from your HTTP request then the JSESSIONID will come back as a cookie in the header. Otherwise you will be issued a redirect to a URL with the JSESSIONID in it. From there, if you handle cookies, the JSESSIONID will be passed automatically with each request with all of the other cookies. Otherwise you'll have to put it into the URL of each request manually.
Download the liveheaders plugin for Firefox and try hitting your servlet with the webbrowser and you can see how the JSESSIONID gets passed around. Next, turn off cookies in Firefox and you can see how it's passed around in the URL and you can see the redirect that Tomcat issues if you watch the headers in liveheaders.