C# – Proxy Basic Authentication in C#: HTTP 407 error

basic-authenticationchttp-status-code-407httpwebrequestPROXY

I am working with a proxy that requires authentication, i.e., in a browser if I try to open a page it will immediately ask for credentials. I supplied same credentials in my program but it fails with HTTP 407 error.

Here is my code:

HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(URL);

IWebProxy proxy = WebRequest.GetSystemWebProxy();
CredentialCache cc = new CredentialCache();
NetworkCredential nc = new NetworkCredential();

nc.UserName = "userName";
nc.Password = "password";
nc.Domain = "mydomain";
cc.Add("http://20.154.23.100", 8888, "Basic", nc);
proxy.Credentials = cc;
//proxy.Credentials = System.Net.CredentialCache.DefaultCredentials;
request.Proxy = proxy;
request.Proxy.Credentials = cc;
request.Credentials = cc;
request.PreAuthenticate = true;

I have tried every possible thing but seem like I am missing something.
Is it something like, I have to make two requests? First with out credentials and once I hear back from server about need for credentials, make same request with credentials?

Best Answer

This method may avoid the need to hard code or configure proxy credentials, which may be desirable.

Put this in your application configuration file - probably app.config. Visual Studio will rename it to yourappname.exe.config on build, and it will end up next to your executable. If you don't have an application configuration file, just add one using Add New Item in Visual Studio.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<configuration>
  <system.net>
    <defaultProxy useDefaultCredentials="true" />
  </system.net>
</configuration>

Related Solutions

C# – 407 Authentication required – no challenge sent

If you want to set credentials for the proxy, shouldn't you set credentials on the request.Proxy object rather than the request object?

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.net.webproxy.credentials.aspx

Also, keep in mind that you need to be making a HTTP/1.1 request (or technically, any request with Keep-Alive) to successfully use NTLM/Negotiate authentication.

(Fiddler's "Auth" inspector will decompose the NTLM authentication blobs for you, if you haven't taken a look at that yet.)

HTTP Basic Authentication – what’s the expected web browser experience

To help everyone avoid confusion, I will reformulate the question in two parts.

First : "how can make an authenticated HTTP request with a browser, using BASIC auth?".

In the browser you can do a http basic auth first by waiting the prompt to come, or by editing the URL if you follow this format: http://myusername:mypassword@somesite.com

NB: the curl command mentionned in the question is perfectly fine, if you have a command-line and curl installed. ;)

References:

Also according to the CURL manual page https://curl.haxx.se/docs/manual.html

HTTP

  Curl also supports user and password in HTTP URLs, thus you can pick a file
  like:

      curl http://name:passwd@machine.domain/full/path/to/file

  or specify user and password separately like in

      curl -u name:passwd http://machine.domain/full/path/to/file

  HTTP offers many different methods of authentication and curl supports
  several: Basic, Digest, NTLM and Negotiate (SPNEGO). Without telling which
  method to use, curl defaults to Basic. You can also ask curl to pick the
  most secure ones out of the ones that the server accepts for the given URL,
  by using --anyauth.

  NOTE! According to the URL specification, HTTP URLs can not contain a user
  and password, so that style will not work when using curl via a proxy, even
  though curl allows it at other times. When using a proxy, you _must_ use
  the -u style for user and password.

The second and real question is "However, on somesite.com, I'm not getting an authorization prompt at all, just a page that says I'm not authorized. Did somesite not implement the Basic Auth workflow correctly, or is there something else I need to do?"

The curl documentation says the -u option supports many method of authentication, Basic being the default.

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