PHP NTLM Authentication to Active Directory + keeping session - php

Question

I've got NTLM (Active Directory) based service, and I need to write a PHP application. Normally, users are logging in to website with Activre Directory credentials, and it's ok.
But what I want to do, is to let them type in their credentials to PHP-written site, which in next step will use cURL to authenticate users to that Active Directory based site where they normally log in.
And this part is hard. I need then to keep session of users that through PHP cURL script authenticated to Active Directory based site in order to use them again later
(CRON querying site to determine that it has changed and automatically do some operations when this happens, which normally user has do manually).
In order to NOT store their credentials to authenticate again when this change happens, I somehow need to store NTLM session in PHP cURL site to every user that authenticated to
that site through this PHP cURL site.
My question is: Is that even possible?
Thanks in advance.
#Willem Mulder
The code you've posted actually does cookie-storing, but that is not my point becouse I've already done that (sorry for not writing it before). What I got so far is:
$cookie_file_path = dirname(__FILE__) . '/cookies.txt';
$ch = curl_init();
//==========================================================================
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERPWD, $username. ':' . $password);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, 0);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, $user_agent);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, 0);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPAUTH, CURLAUTH_ANY);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, $cookie_file_path);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, $cookie_file_path);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLINFO_HEADER_OUT, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FAILONERROR, 0);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_MAXREDIRS, 100);
//==========================================================================
$ret = curl_exec($ch);
By using options CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE and CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, cURL does the cookie storing in local file "cookies.txt". The problem is, that when I comment CURLOPT_USERPWD option (after authenticating and storing cookie, so theoretically I have session), I cannot authorize to website. Perhaps it reinitializes NTLM Handshake authorisation and is expecting username and password, which I don't want to store.
I want to store session info only, to provide service this session info and omit second authentication, but cURL seems to not take this data from cookie file, and REWRITES it with not relevant data send to me from service as response to NOT AUTHRORISED access request.

Answer 1

Well, yes you could
$ch = curl_init('http://www.google.com/');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
// Get headers too with this line
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 1);
$result = curl_exec($ch);
// Get cookie
preg_match('/^Set-Cookie:\s*([^;]*)/mi', $result, $m);
var_dump(parse_url($m[1]));
// And then of course store it somewhere :-)
As seen here how to get the cookies from a php curl into a variable