Develop Reference

MVC4 - Android authentication via http POST and FormsAuthentication

I know there are plenty of resources like this on the web, and the closest I've come was the answer to this question: ASP.NET Web API Authentication.
Basically, this is my requirement. Log in via android to my account on an MVC4 internet application I created (which uses SimpleMembership). It is NOT an MVC Web Api app, which seems to confuse things when looking at the various ways of achieving this.
I am attempting to use FormsAuthentication to set an authentication cookie, but I have no idea how to configure my android httpclient to actually send through this authentication cookie, or how to get MVC to save a session from my android app.
So far, this is what I've come up with on the MVC side:
[HttpPost]
[AllowAnonymous]
public bool LoginMobi(LoginModel model)
{
var membership = (SimpleMembershipProvider)Membership.Provider;
if (membership.ValidateUser(model.UserName, model.Password))
{
FormsAuthentication.SetAuthCookie(model.UserName, false);
return true;
}
else return false;
}
And I use the following java in my android app (sent over an SSL connection):
DefaultHttpClient httpclient = new DefaultHttpClient();
HttpPost httppost = new HttpPost("https://mysite/api/login");
List<NameValuePair> nameValue = new ArrayList<NameValuePair>();
nameValue.add(new BasicNameValuePair("UserName", "foo"));
nameValue.add(new BasicNameValuePair("Password", "bar"));
httppost.setEntity(new UrlEncodedFormEntity(nameValue));
httppost.setHeader("Content-type", "application/json");
HttpResponse response = httpclient.execute(httppost);
// etc etc
What I haven't figured out is how to receive the authentication cookie on android and send it back with each request to controllers with the [Authorize] attribute. I'm rather new to this so please forgive my ignorance!

You are using FormsAuthentication which uses cookie to identify user for each request. You have two options here.
Use CookieStore for HttpClient. Check Android HttpClient and Cookies
OR
Combine BASIC auth and FormsAuthentication. Check Combining Forms Authentication and Basic Authentication
Hope this helps.

Android DefaultHttpClient Session Check

I'm very new to Android programming and I have following doubt.
I use DefaultHttpClient for making Http calls to my server. It works fine.
Are there any way to check whether the session is still live on my DefaultHttpClient object?
Is that possible to do so?
Thanks in advance.

android: http entity explanation

I am new to android and currently developing an app.. Just wanted to know what exactly does an http entity does? Also please tell me, why it gives me an error on the following code:
HttpClient cl=new HttpClient // Cannot instantiate HttpClient
but this works..
HttpClient cl=new DefaultHttpClient
If you have any resources related to httpclient and webservices please tell!
Thanks a lot for your help!

HttpClient is an abstract interface so it can't be instantiated. DefaultHttpClient implements HttpClient (through the AbstractHttpClient interface) so you can instantiate that
You would probably want to read up on abstract classes and interfaces and become familiar with them.

Authentication Error when using HttpPost with DefaultHttpClient on Android

I'm running into a strange problem using HttpClient. I am using a DefaultHttpClient() with HttpPost. I was using HttpGet with 100% success but now trying to switch to HttpPost as the REST API I'm using wants POST parameters rather than GET. (Only for some API calls though so I know that the GET calls were working fine so it's not a fault of the API).
Also, I tried using HttpPost on a simple php script I wrote that looks for a POST parameter 'var' and echoes it to screen, passing this parameters as follows worked fine:
List<NameValuePair> nameValuePairs = new ArrayList<NameValuePair>();
postMethod = new HttpPost("http://www.examplewebsite.com");
nameValuePairs.add(new BasicNameValuePair("var", "lol"));
try {
postMethod.setEntity(new UrlEncodedFormEntity(nameValuePairs));
response = httpClient.execute(postMethod, responseHandler);
Log.i("RESTMethod", response);
...
The problem is that when I tried and do the same call to the API (but with the params changed to the API params obviously) I get the following error:
Authentication error: Unable to respond to any of these challenges: {}
The page I am requesting is an HTTPS page, could this be the problem?
But doing the same type of POST request to a raw HTTP page on the API gives the same error, unless I comment out the StringEntity part and then it runs (but returns xml and I want to pass a parameter to request the data in JSON).
This seems like a really strange problem (the non-https part) but couldn't really find any help on this problem so sorry if the answer is out there.
Any ideas?
Thanks in advance,
Infinitifzz
EDIT: Okay I'm getting nowhere so I thought if I directed you to the API it might shed some light, it's the 8Tracks API and as you can see you need to pass a dev key (api_key) for all requests and I the part I'm stuck on is using https to log a user in with: http://www.8tracks.com/sessions.xml" part.
Hope this helps somehow because I am at a dead end.
Thanks,
Infinitifizz

Authentication error: Unable to
respond to any of these challenges: {}
This error message means that the server responded with 401 (Unauthorized) status code but failed to provide a single auth challenge (WWW-Authenticate header) thus making it impossible for HttpClient to automatically recover from the authentication failure.
Most likely application expects some soft of credentials in the HTML form enclosed in the HTTP POST request.

Don't you have to declare the port and protocol? I'm just swagging this code so please don't be upset if it doesn't immediatley compile correctly. Also, I usually supply a UsernamePasswordCredentials to my setCredentials() but I imagine it's the same.
HttpHost host = new HttpHost("www.foo.com", 443, "https");
// assemble your GET or POST
client.getCredentialsProvider().setCredentials(new AuthScope(host.getHostName(), host.getPort()));
HttpResponse response = client.execute(host, [HttpPost or HttpGet]);
More info about setCredentials here.

Here's how I ended up with similar problem:
DefaultHttpClient client = new DefaultHttpClient();
client.getCredentialsProvider().setCredentials(AuthScope.ANY,
new UsernamePasswordCredentials(username, password));
Thanks to Ryan for right direction.

Not specifying a Callback URL for my Twitter App resulted in the same error for me:
Authentication error: Unable to respond to any of these challenges: {oauth=WWW-Authenticate: OAuth realm="https://api.twitter.com"}
Setting a callback URL on Twitter fixed the problem

Android DefaultHttpClient accept all certificates for SSL session help

I am attempting to connect to a local HTTPS server using the apache DefaultHttpClient on a Android device.
DefaultHttpClient httpclient = new DefaultHttpClient();
HttpPost httppost = new HttpPost("http://192.168.1.121:4113/services");
... header and content filling in ...
HttpResponse response = httpclient.execute(httppost);
I am getting an error of "javax.net.ssl SSLException: Not trusted server certificate" when the .execute runs. I want to simply allow any certificate to work, regardless of if it is or is not in the android key chain.
I have spent about 40 hours researching and trying to figure out a workaround for this issue. I have seen many examples of how to do this but none so far have worked in Android; they seem to only work for JAVA. Does anyone know how to configure, or override the certificate validation used by the Apache HttpClient in Android so that it will just approve all certificates for a DefaultHttpClient connection?
I thank you for your kind response

If anyone is still trying to figure this out I ended up going with the solution here:
HTTPS GET (SSL) with Android and self-signed server certificate
Scroll down to the solution by SimonJ. It is a simple straight forward solution to this problem.

Look at this tutorial http://blog.antoine.li/index.php/2010/10/android-trusting-ssl-certificates/
The tutorial is based on Apache's HttpClient and explains how to use the SSLSocketFactory to trust the defined certificates in your own keystore (also explained how you can create it with the BouncyCastle provider).
I've tested it and it works great. In my opinion this is the secure way.