http or https authentication for Intranet Web applications

Question

I’m developing an Intranet application and I want to make a secure authentication.

One approach can be use “https”. The problem is that the server doesn’t have a trusted certificate, therefore is a bit annoying for the client because the browser doesn’t trust in the certificate and complaints with a scary message.

Using http will compromise the user password but it can be combined with “Digest access authentication”

What do you think?

Answer 1

These are (y)our options:

1. If you have mostly Windows hosts, you can Distribute Certificates to Client Computers by Using Group Policy | Microsoft Docs and use your own self-signed certificate in this way.

   • Non windows users or Windows machines not in the domain will have to go through the hoops and warnings of either installing the certificate properly manuallly or allowing the self-signed certificate. A bad user experience.

2. You use a proper domain name, a real certificate and a messy DNS configuration where www.mycompany.com resolves to an external site, but wiki.mycompany.com is an internal site (But please, please don't put the internal address for wiki.mycompany.com in an externally visible DNS record!)

3. You don't use HTTPS at all and use HTTP. Possibly by inventing your own security for login pages (Yikes!)

They all suck.

Especially if you want to distribute an enterprise-ready onsite app, and you don't know the customer's network and DNS configuration beforehand.

Answer 2

Purchase a domain and trusted certificate? They are really not that expensive anymore if you shop around.

Having said that, digest access authentication is reasonably safe for authentication. Using http rather than https, all of the information you send across the wire will be plain text even if the password is not. Anyone that can plug a laptop in to your intranet running an application such as WireShark can view all of the information sent back and forth. If you care about that information not being compromised, http will not meet your needs.