如何进行自动身份验证以自动登录网站？

Question

I need to get automatically login to website from my windows application. I am doing it with HttpWebRequest but what i want is to

1. Click on the button in my application.
2. Open the Index page (page after getting login)

Reason : I don't want to enter user name and pasword, i just want to click button and any browser(default browser) open with index page (page after login)

Normal Example :

1. I open a link " http://mail.yahoo.com " it shows me a page asking my email address and password.
2. I enter the email id and password and press Login.
3. It redirects me to my Mail box page.

What to Do ?

1. click on the button
2. Automatically send my email id or user name and password to the website
3. Open my Mail box page.

Hint :

1. get cookie from HttpWebRequest.
2. set it to the browser.
3. Open browser and pass the credentials to login automatcially

can anyone help me?

Answer 1

I also need to solve the same issue, and the problem is hint point 2 in your list. ie. how to set a cookie in a browser, without limiting yourself to using a specific broswer. The conclusion I am coming to, is that I need to use a standard 'Single Sign-On' logic, where we update the web-server to use short term tokens such as mentioned here... http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms972971.aspx

In this case the steps would be something like:
1. In app - Logon with HttpWebRequest.
2. Get short-term token (the link suggests validity lifetime of just 2 seconds)
3. Open browser with url http://MyWebsite>/SignNn?token=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
4. Next I need to confirm if the SignOn process can return cookies correctly.

Answer 2

I dont think you can solve this in a generic way.
What usually happens in such scenarios is that the form within the web page is submited to web server, the web server reads the user name / password values from the form and authenticates the user against the underlying user managment repository.
You can write such a solution for specific sites, by analzying with a sniffer the posted form in the authentication pages, and then creating such an http message yourself and sending it to the relevant site.