Making Use of SPNEGO in Your J2EE and .NET Client Applications

Overview

SPNEGO, or the Simple and Protected GSSAPI Negotiation Mechanism, enables a straightforward Single Sign-On (SSO) environment for WebSphere in Microsoft Active Directory environments. In addition to SSO for web applications, SPNEGO can also be used to authenticate both J2EE and .NET web services clients. This paper explain how both J2EE clients and .NET clients can generate client stubs from exported web services, and then engage the SPNEGO protocol to provide SSO authentication to the WebSphere Application Server hosting these services. RedHat Enterprise Linux 4 was used as the OS to host the instance of WebSphere Application Server for the examples. An instance of Windows Server 2003 hosted the Active Directory and a Windows XP instance in the AD domain was used to host the application clients.