Single Sign-on with Sharepoint 2010 from 3rd party application without password

Question

Overview

Our SharePoint 2010 application will be launched from a 3rd party application, let's call it HealthApp, via an embedded URL. Much of the time the user will be logged into HealthApp from a shared workstation. As a result, SharePoint will not sign in automatically using the Active Directory credentials.

Requirements

• We need single sign-on.
• We need to continue to use Active Directory as the STS for various reasons.
• Authentication from a stand-alone browser on the user's workstation will need to work as it does now.

Authentication Info

• HealthApp can pass a username and any other custom identifier information we want as URL parameters.
• The username will match the users Active Directory username.
• We will not have a password.
• We need some way to authenticate the user based only on the username/identifier.

Possible Solutions

• Is there any way to bypass the password check in Active Directory? This would appear to be the simplest solution if possible.
• Can we extend the Active Directory provider to authenticate using a generic user and then log into SharePoint with the username passed on the URL?
• Any other suggestions?

I would think there would have to be some way to do this but have not had much experience with claims based authentication with SharePoint.

Thanks for any insight.

Answer 1

Me also facing same issue for authenticating users over share point site that uses claims authentication.As per requirements my app needs to access share point data. So to authenticate over share point server from an app we need to provide some authenticated claims with the request so that share point STS can issue an authorization ticket to access the share point site resources. after spending more than 2 days in googling i found some interested article that may help to authenticate users from client app against identity provider systems.

OAuth library

this resides between app and identity provider system. using this you get an authenticated claims that will further use to authorize over share point server with the help of Share point STS.