Using Web Service to authenticate on LDAP

Question

Hi there,

Since it' apparently not possible to authenticate with LDAP on my BlackBerry App, I'm trying to use a kind of workaround. Instead of authenticate directly on the LDAP Server, I want to use a Web Service in between. So it looks like this

App --calls--> Web Service --calls--> LDAP Server

So the Web Service should take the username and password given from the Application and send it to the LDAP Server. If its possible to sign in, the Web Service gets a TRUE as response and forward it to the App.

That's how it should work. But at the moment, when I call the Web Service from the App, I get following error: SoapFault - faultcode: 'S:Server' faultstring: 'java.lang.NullPointerException' faultactor: 'null' detail: org.kxml2.kdom.Node@21e05a11

Seems like a Server problem but I don't know where :(
Well, that's the Web Service I'm using:

`import javax.ejb.Stateless;
import javax.jws.WebService;

import com.novell.ldap.LDAPConnection;
import com.novell.ldap.LDAPException;

@Stateless
@WebService()
public class ldapServiceBean implements ldapService {

@Override
public String error() {
    // TODO Auto-generated method stub
    return null;
}

@Override
public boolean ldapLogin(String username, String password) {
     int ldapPort = LDAPConnection.DEFAULT_PORT;
     int ldapVersion = LDAPConnection.LDAP_V3;
     String ldapHost = "dc1.somehost ";
     String loginDN =
     "CN="+username+",OU=employee,OU=user,DC=somehost";

     byte[] passwordBytes = password.getBytes();
     LDAPConnection lc = new LDAPConnection();

     try {
         // connect to the server
         lc.connect( ldapHost, ldapPort );

         // authenticate to the server
         lc.bind( ldapVersion, loginDN, passwordBytes );
         System.out.println("Bind successful");

         return true;
     }
     catch( LDAPException e ) {
         if ( e.getResultCode() == LDAPException.NO_SUCH_OBJECT ) {
             System.err.println( "Error: No such entry" );
         } else if ( e.getResultCode() ==
             LDAPException.NO_SUCH_ATTRIBUTE ) {
             System.err.println( "Error: No such attribute" );
         } else {
             System.err.println( "Error: " + e.toString() );
         }
     }
    return false;
}

And that's the method calling the Web Service

private static final String SOAP_ACTION = "";
private static final String METHOD_NAME = "ldapLogin";
private static final String NAMESPACE = "http://ldapproxy.somehost/";
private static final String URL = "http://myIP:8080/LDAPProxy/ldapServiceBeanService";

...

public boolean login(String username, String password) {

    SoapObject request = new SoapObject(NAMESPACE, METHOD_NAME); 

    //SoapObject
    request.addProperty("username", username);
    request.addProperty("password", password);

    SoapSerializationEnvelope envelope = new SoapSerializationEnvelope(SoapEnvelope.VER11);
    //envelope.dotNet = true;
    //envelope.bodyOut = request;
    envelope.setOutputSoapObject(request);       

    HttpTransport httpTransport = new HttpTransport(URL);
    try
    {

        httpTransport.call(SOAP_ACTION, envelope);

        System.out.println("request: " + httpTransport.requestDump);
        resultsRequestSOAP = (SoapObject) envelope.getResponse();

        return true;

    }catch(SoapFault sF){
        String error = sF.toString();
        Dialog.alert(error);
    }
    catch (Exception aE)
    {
        Dialog.alert("Connection failed");
        aE.printStackTrace ();
    }
    return false;

}

---

What I found out so far: It seems that the webservice don't receives the username and password property. As I print them I get: CN=null, OU=employee, OU=...

Like I've read at this post http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3046489/web-service-recieves-null-parameters-from-application-using-ksoap-method it seems ksoap have a problem with colons. I changed my NAMESPACE but without any success. Maybe I need to change my URL too. But how would I do this while I still need to use localhost ?

Answer 1

As always when doing LDAP bind testing this way, recall that the standard requires that a bind of a username, no password, is a successful Anonymous bind, so therefore you MUST validate for this case (empty password) on login attempts.