Workaround for Python & Selenium: authenticate against Active Directory

Question

I am using Python (2.7) and Selenium (3.4.3) to drive Firefox (52.2.0 ESR) via geckodriver (0.19.0) to automate a process on a CentOS 7 machine.
I need totally unattende

Answer 1

Solution Found:

I needed to use a browser extension. My solution has been built for chromium but it should port almost-unchanged for Firefox and maybe edge.

First up, you need 2 APIs to be available for your browser:

• webRequest.onAuthRequired - Chrome & Firefox
• runtime.nativeMessaging - Chrome & Firefox

While both browser APIs are very similar, they do have some significant differences - such as Chrome's implementation lacking Promises.

If you setup your Native Messaging Host to send a properly-formed JSON string, you need only poll it once. This means you can use a single call to runtime.sendNativeMessage() and be assured that your credentials are paresable. Pun intended.

Next, we need to look at how we're supposed to handle the webRequest.onAuthRequired event.

Since I'm working in Chromium, I need to use the promise-less Chrome API.

chrome.webRequest.onAuthRequired.addListener(
  callbackFunctionHere,
  {urls:[targetUrls]},
  ['asyncBlocking'] // --> this line is important, too. Very.

The Change:

I'll be calling my function provideCredentials because I'm a big stealy-stealer and used an example from this source. Look for the asynchronous version.

The example code fetches the credentials from storage.local ...

chrome.storage.local.get(null, gotCredentials);

We don't want that. Nope.

We want to get the credentials from a single call to sendNativeMessage so we'll change that one line.

chrome.runtime.sendNativeMessage(hostName, { text: "Ready" }, gotCredentials);

That's all it takes. Seriously. As long as your Host plays nice, this is the big secret. I won't even tell you how long it took me to find it!

Links:

My questions with helpful links:

• Here - Workaround for Authenticating against Active Directory
• Here - Also has some working code for a functional NM Host
• Here - Some enlightening material on promises

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So this turns out to be a non-trivial problem.

I haven't implemented the solution, yet, but I know how to get there...

Passing values to an extension is the first step - this can be done in both Chrome and Firefox. Watch the version to make sure the API required, nativeMessaging, actually exists in your version. I have had to switch to chromium for this reason.

Alternatively, one can use the storage API to put values in browser storage first. [edit: I did not go this way for security concerns]

Next is to use the onAuthRequired event from the webRequest API . Setup a listener on the event and pass in the values you need.

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Caveats: I have built everything right up to the extension itself for the nativeMessaging API solution and there's still a problem with getting the script to recognise the data. This is almost certainly my JavaScript skills clashing with the arcane knowledge required to make these APIs make much sense ... I have yet to attempt the storage method as it's less secure (in my mind) but it does seem to be simpler.