authentication error with Sharepoint integration

[msgmahesh]

We are trying to integrate some Cognos reports/dashboards into Sharepoint. We hit a wall with this project with the way we authenticate users to Cognos. We use a third party tool written in Cognos SDK for authentication. All our users access Cognos from a link off our corporate site. The corporate site passes the userid of the person logged in as a cookie which is used by the tool to authenticate into Cognos.

The issue we are having is when we use the Cognos webparts inside sharepoint. We get an error:  "CAM-AAA-0179 The 3rd party provider returned an unrecoverable exception. Username not found in cookie, form filed or properties file". Looks like the webpart doesn't pass the cookie info through to Cognos.
Any ideas???

[xiska]

Hi

Sounds not so easy.
Cookies cannot be passed from one side to an other - but they can be used in the same domain.
I think that the program you use cannot read the cookie. It may exist - but for an other domain.
I asume that you use the IIS as the webserver.
In this case there is almost no need for passing anything. If you use the "integrated windows authentication" in your browser options, the webserver supports it as well and the username\domain is getting into the REMOTE_USER Variable of the webserver you will not get any authentication prompt. You may remember the username\domain setting in a series 7 ldap. Apache users may use mod_sspi.
Try to use Firefox - this browser shows the cookies and the domains.

E.G. This webiste sets 2 cookies: COGNOiSeCookie88 and PHPSESSID. They cannot be read from XYZ.com. It is a simple security issue. Therefore in forums often javascript is disabled due to XSS - Cross side Scripting.