ASP.NET: How do I open an external website page whose login credentials I have?

Question

Platform: ASP.NET 4.0, VS 2010

My scenario is this

1. I have the credentials of an external website
2. I do a couple of GET/POST to scrape some data off of it
3. Depending on something that I find, I want to give my user a hyperlink that, when clicked, takes him 3 levels deep into the target website beyond the login page

Of course, I could just provide a URL to the top level on the target site, and he would click through to get there. But is there a way, via ASP.NET, that I can programmatically login and then open the page on a separate window/tab?

Answer 1

I think that, to have the user avoid the login, you're going to have to scrape that page and present it to the user yourself. If you pass the user along to the page at all then he's going to have to authenticate against it. Your application on your server authenticated, but the user in his browser did not. Unless there's some strange (and terribly insecure) quirk about the destination page, it's not going to trust that the user is you.