Android: NTLM Authentication, ksoap, and persistent connections

After working with iOS and dealing with auth challenges without much of a learning curve, I've found that Windows Authentication is much more complicated of a process in Java/Android.

I tried multiple different approaches, so without getting too much into those, I will get to the one that worked for the most part. I'm now using the class created for NTLM and ksoap called NtlmTransport

I'm now successfully authenticating in the following way:

NtlmTransport httpTransport = new NtlmTransport();
            httpTransport.setCredentials(serverURL, Login.username, Login.password, deviceIp, "DOMAINNAME");
            httpTransport.call(SOAP_ACTION, envelope);

If you take a look at the NtlmTransport class, you'll see that it's returning the following headers from the setupNtlm():

status Line HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Setup Cache-Control:private, max-age=0
Setup Content-Type:text/html; charset=utf-8
Setup Server:Microsoft-IIS/8.0
Setup X-AspNet-Version:4.0.30319
Setup Persistent-Auth:true
Setup X-Powered-By:ASP.NET
Setup Date:Tue, 17 Sep 2013 20:57:45 GMT
Setup Content-Length:11549

The "Persistent-Auth:true is the main one I'm concerned about at this time. I'm getting the SoapObjects just fine and can get the data I need from that one connection, but as soon as I try to access the web service again, which is presumably able to be hit after the successful authentication, I can't access a different method using HttpTransportSE:

private void setSomething() {

    xml = null;
    final String SOAP_ACTION = "http://this.ismy.org/AWebServiceMethod";
    final String METHOD_NAME = "AWebServiceMethod";
    final String URL = protocol + "://" + host  + ":" + port + "/WebService.asmx";
    SoapObject request = new SoapObject(NAMESPACE, METHOD_NAME);
    SoapSerializationEnvelope envelope = new SoapSerializationEnvelope(SoapEnvelope.VER11);
    envelope.dotNet = true;
    envelope.setOutputSoapObject(request);
    envelope.implicitTypes = true;
    envelope.setAddAdornments(false);

    try
    {
        HttpTransportSE transport = new HttpTransportSE(URL);
        transport.debug = true;
        transport.call(SOAP_ACTION, envelope);
        xml = transport.responseDump.toString();
        Log.d(TAG, xml);
    }
    catch(SocketException ex)
    {
        Log.e("SocketException : " , "Error on setSomething() " + ex.getMessage());
    }
    catch (Exception e)
    {
        Log.e("Exception : " , "Error on setSomething() " + e.getMessage());
    }
}

This all works just fine as the background task of an AsyncTask, which then passes the "xml" to an XMLPullParser method.

The main question here is why am I getting a:

Error on setSomething() No authentication challenges found

After IIS successfully validates the user with a 200, why is it asking me to authenticate again? How can I persist that first authenticated challenge to hit whatever method I want inside WebService.asmx? What are the headers that need to be added/changed to create a session if necessary? What am I missing that makes this whole NTLM process work and persist for more than the WS method that needs to pass the authentication challenges?

EDIT : Adding the Library code

Here's the link to the JCIFS from Apache

public static final class JCIFSEngine implements NTLMEngine {

    private static final int TYPE_1_FLAGS =
            NtlmFlags.NTLMSSP_NEGOTIATE_56 |
                    NtlmFlags.NTLMSSP_NEGOTIATE_128 |
                    NtlmFlags.NTLMSSP_NEGOTIATE_NTLM2 |
                    NtlmFlags.NTLMSSP_NEGOTIATE_ALWAYS_SIGN |
                    NtlmFlags.NTLMSSP_REQUEST_TARGET;

    public String generateType1Msg(final String domain, final String workstation)
            throws NTLMEngineException {
        final Type1Message type1Message = new Type1Message(TYPE_1_FLAGS, domain, workstation);
        return jcifs.util.Base64.encode(type1Message.toByteArray());
    }

    public String generateType3Msg(final String username, final String password,
                                   final String domain, final String workstation, final String challenge)
            throws NTLMEngineException {
        Type2Message type2Message;
        try {
            type2Message = new Type2Message(jcifs.util.Base64.decode(challenge));
        } catch (final IOException exception) {
            throw new NTLMEngineException("Invalid NTLM type 2 message", exception);
        }
        final int type2Flags = type2Message.getFlags();
        final int type3Flags = type2Flags
                & (0xffffffff ^ (NtlmFlags.NTLMSSP_TARGET_TYPE_DOMAIN | NtlmFlags.NTLMSSP_TARGET_TYPE_SERVER));
        final Type3Message type3Message = new Type3Message(type2Message, Login.password, "",
                Login.username, deviceIp, type3Flags);

            System.out.println("type3Message: " + type3Message.toByteArray());

        return jcifs.util.Base64.encode(type3Message.toByteArray());
    }
}

So is the "NtlmFlags.NTLMSSP_NEGOTIATE_ALWAYS_SIGN" causing this problem? Is there another flag I'm supposed to set for the keep-alive? Also, I found a great resource for a list of NTLM flags and more: http://fossies.org/dox/jcifs-1.3.17/interfacejcifs_1_1ntlmssp_1_1NtlmFlags.html

public List call(String soapAction, SoapEnvelope envelope, List headers, File outputFile) throws IOException, XmlPullParserException { HttpResponse resp = null; try { //setupNtlm(urlString, user, password); DefaultHttpClient httpclient = new DefaultHttpClient(); httpclient.getAuthSchemes().register("ntlm", new NTLMSchemeFactory()); httpclient.getCredentialsProvider().setCredentials( new AuthScope(AuthScope.ANY_HOST, AuthScope.ANY_PORT), new NTCredentials(user, password, "", "") ); HttpPost httpget = new HttpPost(urlString); httpget.addHeader("soapaction", soapAction); httpget.addHeader("Content-Type", "text/xml; charset=utf-8"); byte[] requestData = null; try { requestData = createRequestData(envelope); } catch (IOException iOException) { } ByteArrayEntity byteArrayEntity = new ByteArrayEntity(requestData); httpget.setEntity(byteArrayEntity); resp = httpclient.execute(httpget); if(resp == null) { System.out.println("Response is null"); } HttpEntity respEntity = resp.getEntity(); InputStream is = respEntity.getContent(); if(is == null) { System.out.println("InputStream is null"); } parseResponse(envelope, is); } catch (Exception ex) { // ex.printStackTrace(); } if (resp != null) { return Arrays.asList(resp.getAllHeaders()); } else { return null; } }

SoapObject request = new SoapObject(NAMESPACE, PRODUCT_DETAILS_METHOD_NAME); request.addProperty("ListingID", Integer.parseInt(Product_ID)); NtlmTransport httpTransport = new NtlmTransport(); httpTransport.setCredentials(URL, USERNAME, PASSWORD, "",""); SoapSerializationEnvelope envelope = new SoapSerializationEnvelope(SoapEnvelope.VER11); envelope.dotNet = true; envelope.implicitTypes = true; envelope.setOutputSoapObject(request); httpTransport.call(PRODUCT_DETAILS_SOAP_ACTION, envelope); SoapObject response = (SoapObject) envelope.getResponse();

Recommended topics

Hot tags