Flash Actionscript NTLM authentication example?

Question

Does anyone have an example of calling a webservice from actionscript 3.0 with NTLM authentication in place. The adobe livedocs list NTLM authentication as supported but I can't figure out where to pass user credentials.

Thanks, Peter

Answer 1

I'm fairly sure that this is not directly possible except when using Adobe AIR. The authentication info in the LiveDocs is applicable only to AIR (the little symbol next to the method name signifies this).

From some quick reading about NTLM over HTTP it looks like it would require you to do multiple requests based on the HTTP status codes you get back from the server. This in itself could be problematic as Flash is flakey at best with providing those codes.

Further, NTLM is a connection-based scheme and requires that you keep the connection alive between the second and third request. Flash can not send the keep-alive header and can not create persistent connections. I tend to think that this eliminates the possibility of having Flash do NTLM authentication natively with AS3.

However, I am NOT an expert on NTLM and the document I cited does not seem to be an official version of the NTLM over HTTP specification. I will not go so far as to say authenticating NTLM via Flash is impossible - it just looks like no matter what it will be very, very hard.