I want to Authenticate in a Web Application & use the Same Credentials for Desktop Application. How do I do that ?

Question

I want to invoke a Desktop Application. Before invoking that Desktop App the user should login to the Web Application & the same credentials to be used in Desktop App. The Web Application is ASP.NET & Desktop App is a SWING based Java Application. Is it possible to authenticate in that case ?

Answer 1

If you're saying you want to automatically log the user into your system from the desktop application if they're already logged in to the web application, this is going to be tricky.

If you're just asking for a way to ensure the user that logged into the desktop app used the same details as the web app, I'd consider just using IP address as authentication.

Answer 2

I'm not sure if I have understood your question correctly, but it seems like you want to share the same authentication source between a desktop app and a web app. This should be possible depending on what that authentication source is. For example if the web app does a look up on LDAP or on a database table, then there's nothing stopping you from doing that from the desktop application, assuming that you can get a database connection, or access the directory server.

If the authentication source of the web app is not available to the desktop app then you might want to consider writing an authentication web service and deploying this alongside your web application. This web service should be able to access the same authentication source as the web application and can be called by your desktop application.