Digest authentication in Android using HttpURLConnection

Question

as the question allready says, I am trying to do digest authentication in android.
Until now i have used the DefaultHttpClient and it\'s authentication meth

Answer 1

It is correct that HttpUrlConnection does not support Digest authentication. If your client must authenticate using Digest, you have a few options:

• Write your own HTTP Digest implementation. This can be a good option if you know which servers that you need to authenticate with and can ignore the parts of the the digest specification that you do not need. Here is an example where a subset of digest is implemented: https://gist.github.com/slightfoot/5624590.
• Use the external lib bare-bones-digest, which is a Digest lib for Android. You can use it to parse Digest challenges and generate responses to them. It supports the common digest use cases and some of the rarely used ones and can be used on top of HttpURLConnection.
• Use OkHttp together with okhttp-digest, which is a plugin that adds Http Digest support to OkHttp. Supporting Digest with OkHttp is easy, just add okhttp-digest as an authenticator and you will have transparent Http digest support. If you already use OkHttp or are OK with switching to it this can be an attractive option.
• Use the Apache HttpClient which supports Digest. The question explicitly states that HttpClient is not an option so I include it mostly for completion's sake. Google does not recommend using HttpClient and has deprecated it.