HttpClient provides full support for authentication schemes defined by the HTTP standard specification as well as a number of widely used non-standard authentication schemes such as NTLM and SPNEGO.

Any process of user authentication requires a set of credentials that can be used to establish user identity. In the simplest form user credentials can be just a user name / password pair. UsernamePasswordCredentials represents a set of credentials consisting of a security principal and a password in clear text. This implementation is sufficient for standard authentication schemes defined by the HTTP standard specification. stdout > NTCredentials is a Microsoft Windows specific implementation that includes in addition to the user name / password pair a set of additional Windows specific attributes such as the name of the user domain. In a Microsoft Windows network the same user can belong to multiple domains each with a different set of authorizations. stdout >

The AuthScheme interface represents an abstract challenge-response oriented authentication scheme. An authentication scheme is expected to support the following functions: Parse and process the challenge sent by the target server in response to request for a protected resource. Provide properties of the processed challenge: the authentication scheme type and its parameters, such the realm this authentication scheme is applicable to, if available Generate the authorization string for the given set of credentials and the HTTP request in response to the actual authorization challenge. Please note that authentication schemes may be stateful involving a series of challenge-response exchanges. HttpClient ships with several AuthScheme implementations: Basic authentication scheme as defined in RFC 2617. This authentication scheme is insecure, as the credentials are transmitted in clear text. Despite its insecurity Basic authentication scheme is perfectly adequate if used in combination with the TLS/SSL encryption. Digest authentication scheme as defined in RFC 2617. Digest authentication scheme is significantly more secure than Basic and can be a good choice for those applications that do not want the overhead of full transport security through TLS/SSL encryption. NTLM is a proprietary authentication scheme developed by Microsoft and optimized for Windows platforms. NTLM is believed to be more secure than Digest. SPNEGO (Simple and Protected GSSAPI Negotiation Mechanism) is a GSSAPI "pseudo mechanism" that is used to negotiate one of a number of possible real mechanisms. SPNEGO's most visible use is in Microsoft's HTTP Negotiate authentication extension. The negotiable sub-mechanisms include NTLM and Kerberos supported by Active Directory. At present HttpClient only supports the Kerberos sub-mechanism. Kerberos authentication implementation.

Credentials providers are intended to maintain a set of user credentials and to be able to produce user credentials for a particular authentication scope. Authentication scope consists of a host name, a port number, a realm name and an authentication scheme name. When registering credentials with the credentials provider one can provide a wild card (any host, any port, any realm, any scheme) instead of a concrete attribute value. The credentials provider is then expected to be able to find the closest match for a particular scope if the direct match cannot be found. HttpClient can work with any physical representation of a credentials provider that implements the CredentialsProvider interface. The default CredentialsProvider implementation called BasicCredentialsProvider is a simple implementation backed by a java.util.HashMap. stdout >

HttpClient relies on the AuthState class to keep track of detailed information about the state of the authentication process. HttpClient creates two instances of AuthState in the course of HTTP request execution: one for target host authentication and another one for proxy authentication. In case the target server or the proxy require user authentication the respective AuthScope instance will be populated with the AuthScope, AuthScheme and Crednetials used during the authentication process. The AuthState can be examined in order to find out what kind of authentication was requested, whether a matching AuthScheme implementation was found and whether the credentials provider managed to find user credentials for the given authentication scope. In the course of HTTP request execution HttpClient adds the following authentication related objects to the execution context: Lookup instance representing the actual authentication scheme registry. The value of this attribute set in the local context takes precedence over the default one. CredentialsProvider instance representing the actual credentials provider. The value of this attribute set in the local context takes precedence over the default one. AuthState instance representing the actual target authentication state. The value of this attribute set in the local context takes precedence over the default one. AuthState instance representing the actual proxy authentication state. The value of this attribute set in the local context takes precedence over the default one. AuthCache instance representing the actual authentication data cache. The value of this attribute set in the local context takes precedence over the default one. The local HttpContext object can be used to customize the HTTP authentication context prior to request execution, or to examine its state after the request has been executed: CredentialsProvider credsProvider = <...> Lookup authRegistry = <...> AuthCache authCache = <...> HttpClientContext context = HttpClientContext.create(); context.setCredentialsProvider(credsProvider); context.setAuthSchemeRegistry(authRegistry); context.setAuthCache(authCache); HttpGet httpget = new HttpGet("http://somehost/"); CloseableHttpResponse response1 = httpclient.execute(httpget, context); <...> AuthState proxyAuthState = context.getProxyAuthState(); System.out.println("Proxy auth state: " + proxyAuthState.getState()); System.out.println("Proxy auth scheme: " + proxyAuthState.getAuthScheme()); System.out.println("Proxy auth credentials: " + proxyAuthState.getCredentials()); AuthState targetAuthState = context.getTargetAuthState(); System.out.println("Target auth state: " + targetAuthState.getState()); System.out.println("Target auth scheme: " + targetAuthState.getAuthScheme()); System.out.println("Target auth credentials: " + targetAuthState.getCredentials()); ]]>

As of version 4.1 HttpClient automatically caches information about hosts it has successfully authenticated with. Please note that one must use the same execution context to execute logically related requests in order for cached authentication data to propagate from one request to another. Authentication data will be lost as soon as the execution context goes out of scope.

HttpClient does not support preemptive authentication out of the box, because if misused or used incorrectly the preemptive authentication can lead to significant security issues, such as sending user credentials in clear text to an unauthorized third party. Therefore, users are expected to evaluate potential benefits of preemptive authentication versus security risks in the context of their specific application environment. Nonetheless one can configure HttpClient to authenticate preemptively by prepopulating the authentication data cache. HttpHost targetHost = new HttpHost("localhost", 80, "http"); CredentialsProvider credsProvider = new BasicCredentialsProvider(); credsProvider.setCredentials( new AuthScope(targetHost.getHostName(), targetHost.getPort()), new UsernamePasswordCredentials("username", "password")); // Create AuthCache instance AuthCache authCache = new BasicAuthCache(); // Generate BASIC scheme object and add it to the local auth cache BasicScheme basicAuth = new BasicScheme(); authCache.put(targetHost, basicAuth); // Add AuthCache to the execution context HttpClientContext context = HttpClientContext.create(); context.setCredentialsProvider(credsProvider); context.setAuthCache(authCache); HttpGet httpget = new HttpGet("/"); for (int i = 0; i < 3; i++) { CloseableHttpResponse response = httpclient.execute( targetHost, httpget, context); try { HttpEntity entity = response.getEntity(); } finally { response.close(); } } ]]>

As of version 4.1 HttpClient provides full support for NTLMv1, NTLMv2, and NTLM2 Session authentication out of the box. One can still continue using an external NTLM engine such as JCIFS library developed by the Samba project as a part of their Windows interoperability suite of programs.

The NTLM authentication scheme is significantly more expensive in terms of computational overhead and performance impact than the standard Basic and Digest schemes. This is likely to be one of the main reasons why Microsoft chose to make NTLM authentication scheme stateful. That is, once authenticated, the user identity is associated with that connection for its entire life span. The stateful nature of NTLM connections makes connection persistence more complex, as for the obvious reason persistent NTLM connections may not be re-used by users with a different user identity. The standard connection managers shipped with HttpClient are fully capable of managing stateful connections. However, it is critically important that logically related requests within the same session use the same execution context in order to make them aware of the current user identity. Otherwise, HttpClient will end up creating a new HTTP connection for each HTTP request against NTLM protected resources. For detailed discussion on stateful HTTP connections please refer to this section. As NTLM connections are stateful it is generally recommended to trigger NTLM authentication using a relatively cheap method, such as GET or HEAD, and re-use the same connection to execute more expensive methods, especially those enclose a request entity, such as POST or PUT. CredentialsProvider credsProvider = new BasicCredentialsProvider(); credsProvider.setCredentials(AuthScope.ANY, new NTCredentials("user", "pwd", "myworkstation", "microsoft.com")); HttpHost target = new HttpHost("www.microsoft.com", 80, "http"); // Make sure the same context is used to execute logically related requests HttpClientContext context = HttpClientContext.create(); context.setCredentialsProvider(credsProvider); // Execute a cheap method first. This will trigger NTLM authentication HttpGet httpget = new HttpGet("/ntlm-protected/info"); CloseableHttpResponse response1 = httpclient.execute(target, httpget, context); try { HttpEntity entity1 = response1.getEntity(); } finally { response1.close(); } // Execute an expensive method next reusing the same context (and connection) HttpPost httppost = new HttpPost("/ntlm-protected/form"); httppost.setEntity(new StringEntity("lots and lots of data")); CloseableHttpResponse response2 = httpclient.execute(target, httppost, context); try { HttpEntity entity2 = response2.getEntity(); } finally { response2.close(); } ]]>

The SPNEGO (Simple and Protected GSSAPI Negotiation Mechanism) is designed to allow for authentication to services when neither end knows what the other can use/provide. It is most commonly used to do Kerberos authentication. It can wrap other mechanisms, however the current version in HttpClient is designed solely with Kerberos in mind. Client Web Browser does HTTP GET for resource. Web server returns HTTP 401 status and a header: WWW-Authenticate: Negotiate Client generates a NegTokenInit, base64 encodes it, and resubmits the GET with an Authorization header: Authorization: Negotiate <base64 encoding>. Server decodes the NegTokenInit, extracts the supported MechTypes (only Kerberos V5 in our case), ensures it is one of the expected ones, and then extracts the MechToken (Kerberos Token) and authenticates it. If more processing is required another HTTP 401 is returned to the client with more data in the the WWW-Authenticate header. Client takes the info and generates another token passing this back in the Authorization header until complete. When the client has been authenticated the Web server should return the HTTP 200 status, a final WWW-Authenticate header and the page content.

The SPNEGO authentication scheme is compatible with Sun Java versions 1.5 and up. However the use of Java >= 1.6 is strongly recommended as it supports SPNEGO authentication more completely. The Sun JRE provides the supporting classes to do nearly all the Kerberos and SPNEGO token handling. This means that a lot of the setup is for the GSS classes. The SPNegoScheme is a simple class to handle marshalling the tokens and reading and writing the correct headers. The best way to start is to grab the KerberosHttpClient.java file in examples and try and get it to work. There are a lot of issues that can happen but if lucky it'll work without too much of a problem. It should also provide some output to debug with. In Windows it should default to using the logged in credentials; this can be overridden by using 'kinit' e.g. $JAVA_HOME\bin\kinit testuser@AD.EXAMPLE.NET, which is very helpful for testing and debugging issues. Remove the cache file created by kinit to revert back to the windows Kerberos cache. Make sure to list domain_realms in the krb5.conf file. This is a major source of problems.

This documentation assumes you are using Windows but much of the information applies to Unix as well. The org.ietf.jgss classes have lots of possible configuration parameters, mainly in the krb5.conf/krb5.ini file. Some more info on the format at http://web.mit.edu/kerberos/krb5-1.4/krb5-1.4.1/doc/krb5-admin/krb5.conf.html.

The following configuration is a basic setup that works in Windows XP against both IIS and JBoss Negotiation modules. The system property java.security.auth.login.config can be used to point at the login.conf file. login.conf content may look like the following:

If unspecified, the system default will be used. Override if needed by setting the system property java.security.krb5.conf to point to a custom krb5.conf file. krb5.conf content may look like the following:

To allow Windows to use the current user's tickets, the system property javax.security.auth.useSubjectCredsOnly must be set to false and the Windows registry key allowtgtsessionkey should be added and set correctly to allow session keys to be sent in the Kerberos Ticket-Granting Ticket. On the Windows Server 2003 and Windows 2000 SP4, here is the required registry setting: Here is the location of the registry setting on Windows XP SP2: