Automated Basic Authenication with an Applet for the Browser

Question

Hi
I like to automate web access to secured pages and proxies, which are
proteced with a Basic Authenication scheme.
The Basic Authentication within an Applet works really well, I get all the
information I need when I attach the
Authorization: Basic base64encodeUID_PW to the request Header.
or
if I use the Authenticator Class of the JDK1.5.
My problem is that the browser do not notice that I already have a
UID/Password combination for the desired web page and I don't want that the Dialog
to enter the UID and Password comes up, when I access the Page later with the browser.
When I did the same with a form based authorisation the URLConnection was
setting the Cookie inside the browser implicitly, the showDocument() method
displayed the secured page, because the browser used the cookie to access
it.
Is there any way to access the cache for the UID and Password of the
browser to set these values, so when I invoke the showDocument() to
display the page inside the browser, I don't have to enter the UID and
Password again?
My current code to authenticate myself is this, I also tried a direct
socket connection and a HttpURLConnection there was no difference:
String urlString =
"http://www.demo.com/basicprotectedpage/index.html"
AppletContext appCont = getAppletContext();
//created password authenticator.
mmAuthenticator myPassAuth = new mmAuthenticator(uid,pw);
//setting password.
Authenticator.setDefault(myPassAuth);
//URL created.
URL url = new URL(urlString);
//opening connection
URLConnection conn = url.openConnection();
//setting do input and do output.
conn.setDoInput(true);
conn.setDoOutput(true);
conn.setUseCaches(true);
//Data Input Stream
BufferedReader bin = new BufferedReader(new
InputStreamReader(conn.getInputStream()));
String inputLine;
System.out.println("web page data " );
while ((inputLine = bin.readLine()) != null)
System.out.println(inputLine);
bin.close();
appCont.showDocument(new URL(urlString)); // this should
display the secured page without the prompt for uid password
Thank you in advance.
Martin

Answer 1

That is properly too late.
However, I am working on a similar problem. This is my insight. If anybody know more than I do, please let me know.
Using the applet, the Authenticator may not work due to the new JRE. I believe if you have the property file within your machine, you may get around this problem. Other than that, I have not figured out a way to get pass this security issue. Anybody have any thought on that ?
To get around this issue, in your case, it is Basic Authentication; so it won't be too bad. You will need to write your own http client. which mean, you will need to be able to read the response from the server and send the proper header back to the server. At least that is how I did it.
The problem I am facing now is doing Digest Authentication. I really hate to do all kind of work to get Digest working. Only if the Authenticator work for me.
Hope that help.