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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-26T09:30:31+00:00

I’m working on building an android application which requires different levels of authentication, and

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I’m working on building an android application which requires different levels of authentication, and I would like to do so using Active Directory.

From what I’ve read, using Kerberos is the way Microsoft suggests. How do I do this for Android? I see the javax.security.auth doc, but it doesn’t tell me too much.

I also saw a note somewhere that Kerberos does not contain user groups – is this true? In that case, would I have to somehow combine LDAP as well?

EDIT

The main goal here is achieving an LDAP connection to the active directory in order to authenticate and give the user correct permissions for the enterprise Android application. The real barrier here is the fact that Google left out many of the Java Web Services API from it’s port to android. (i.e. javax.naming) Also, many of the connection mechanisms in the Android jar seem to be only included as legacy code, and they in fact actually do nothing.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    For that you might be better off just staying completely within LDAP and don’t venture into the kerberos. Kerberos gives you advantage of Single Sign On, but since your android app doesn’t have any credentials already in place it doesn’t really help you. I guess google had their own reasons not to include the javax.naming into the distro. It is pretty heavy stuff.

    You might be able to either port the stuff yourself from java runtime library sources, or might be better off using native LDAP library. For example this one.

    Just remember to use secure LDAP connection or at least secure authentication method. More info about this is here.

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