Question

I’m vaguely aware that on a computer joined to a domain IE can be asked to send some extra headers that I could use to automatically sign on to an application. I’ve got apache running on a windows server with mod_php. I’d like to be able to avoid the user having to log in if necessary. I’ve found some links talking about Kerberos and Apache modules.

http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2003/09/11/kerberos.html?page=last
https://metacpan.org/pod/Apache2::AuthenNTLM

Since I’m running on Windows it’s proven to be non-trivial to get Perl or Apache modules installed. But doesn’t PHP already have access to HTTP headers?

I found this but it doesn’t do any authentication, it just shows that PHP can read the NTLM headers.
http://siphon9.net/loune/2007/10/simple-lightweight-ntlm-in-php/

I’d like to be able to have my users just point to the application and have them automatically authenticated. Has anyone had any experience with this or gotten it to work at all?

UPDATE
Since originally posting this question, we’ve changed setups to nginx and php-fcgi still running on windows. Apache2 and php-cgi on windows is probably one of the slowest setups you could configure on windows. It’s looking like Apache might still be needed (it works with php-fcgi) but I would prefer a nginx solution.

I also still don’t understand (and would love to be educated) why HTTP server plugins are necessary and we can’t have a PHP, web server agnostic solution.

Answer 1

All you need is the mod_auth_sspi Apache module.

Sample configuration:

AuthType SSPI
SSPIAuth On
SSPIAuthoritative On
SSPIDomain mydomain

# Set this if you want to allow access with clients that do not support NTLM, or via proxy from outside. Don't forget to require SSL in this case!
SSPIOfferBasic On

# Set this if you have only one domain and don't want the MYDOMAIN\ prefix on each user name
SSPIOmitDomain On

# AD user names are case-insensitive, so use this for normalization if your application's user names are case-sensitive
SSPIUsernameCase Lower
AuthName "Some text to prompt for domain credentials"
Require valid-user

And don’t forget that you can also use Firefox for transparent SSO in a Windows domain: Simply go to about:config, search for network.automatic-ntlm-auth.trusted-uris, and enter the host name or FQDN of your internal application (like myserver or myserver.corp.domain.com). You can have more than one entry, it’s a comma-separated list.