Authenticating on ADFS with Python script

ADFS uses complicated redirection and CSRF protection techniques. Thus, it is better to use a browser automation tool to perform the authentication and parse the webpage afterwards. I recommend the selenium toolkit with python bindings. Here is a working example:

from selenium import webdriver
def MS_login(usrname, passwd):  # call this with username and password
    driver = webdriver.Edge()   # change to your browser (supporting Firefox, Chrome, ...)
    driver.delete_all_cookies() # clean up the prior login sessions
    driver.get('https://login.microsoftonline.com/') # change the url to your website
    time.sleep(5) # wait for redirection and rendering

    driver.find_element_by_xpath("//input[@name='loginfmt'").send_keys(usrname)
    driver.find_element_by_xpath("//input[@type='submit']").click()
    time.sleep(5)

    driver.find_element_by_xpath("//input[@name='passwd'").send_keys(passwd)
    driver.find_element_by_xpath("//input[@name='KMSI' and @type='checkbox'").click()
    driver.find_element_by_xpath("//input[@type='submit']").click()
    time.sleep(5)

    driver.find_element_by_xpath("//input[@type='submit']").click()

    # Successfully login

    # parse the site ...

    driver.close() # close the browser
    return driver

This script calls Microsoft Edge to open the website. It injects the username and password to the correct DOM elements and then let the browser to handle the rest. It has been tested on the webpage "https://login.microsoftonline.com". You may need to modify it to suit your website.


To Answer your question "How to Get in with python" i am assuming you want perform some web scraping operation on the pages which is secured by Azure AD authentication.

In these kind of scenario, you have to do the following steps.

  1. For this script we will only need to import the following:

    import requests from lxml import html

First, we would like to create our session object. This object will allow us to persist the login session across all our requests.

session_requests = requests.session()

Second, we would like to extract the csrf token from the web page, this token is used during login. For this example we are using lxml and xpath, we could have used regular expression or any other method that will extract this data.

login_url = "https://bitbucket.org/account/signin/?next=/"
result = session_requests.get(login_url)

tree = html.fromstring(result.text)
authenticity_token = list(set(tree.xpath("//input[@name='csrfmiddlewaretoken']/@value")))[0]

Next, we would like to perform the login phase. In this phase, we send a POST request to the login url. We use the payload that we created in the previous step as the data. We also use a header for the request and add a referer key to it for the same url.

result = session_requests.post(
    login_url, 
    data = payload, 
    headers = dict(referer=login_url)
)

Payload would be a dictionary object of user name and password etc.

payload = {
    "username": "<USER NAME>", 
    "password": "<PASSWORD>", 
    "csrfmiddlewaretoken": "<CSRF_TOKEN>"
}

Note:- This is just an example.

Step 2:

Scrape content

Now, that we were able to successfully login, we will perform the actual scraping

url = 'https://bitbucket.org/dashboard/overview'
result = session_requests.get(
    url, 
    headers = dict(referer = url)
)

So in other words, you need to get the request details payload from Azure AD and then create a session object using logged in method and then finally do the scraping.

Here is a very good example of Web scraping of a secured website.

Hope it helps.