Overview of Windows Authentication

Integrated Windows authentication is most frequently used within intranet environments since it requires that the server performing the authentication and the user being authenticated are part of the same domain. For the user to be authenticated automatically, the client machine used by the user must also be part of the domain.

There are several options for implementing integrated Windows authentication with Apache Tomcat. They are:

• Built-in Tomcat support.
• Use a third party library such as Waffle.
• Use a reverse proxy that supports Windows authentication to perform the authentication step such as IIS or httpd.

The configuration of each of these options is discussed in the following sections.