I should say again, the form can be submitted without JavaScript
Your question looked pretty interesting, so I took a stab at it. Turns out I can't log in at all using mozilla.
Here's what I tried:

Of these, only using genuine IE worked — they're doing something nefarious.
So, a quick experiment with an HTTP Sniffer reveals that IE POSTs the request, to which the webserver doesn't appear to respond, but it does offer a 301 redirect to another GET request.

I've got absolutely no idea how this works — as I understand HTTP, this shouldn't happen; which probably explains why it doesn't work with Mozilla. Could you show us some (password/username-sanitized) code so we can play with it ourselves?

Update: This bit added

so what the point of their weird MD5-hashing of hidden fields and passwords is I don't know
That appears to be used if JavaScript's enabled (which would probably be for 95% of their users) — it prevents transmission of the password in cleartext. Instead, an MD5 hash of their password with a server-provided challenge is sent. The challenge token probably (hopefully) expires once used, and after a timeout period. This is a pretty effective way of preventing password-sniffing, and because the password entry would still be there for non-JavaScript browsers, it'd work for users without JavaScript (although they'd have to be using a broken browser as discussed above).

cheers


davis
It's not easy to juggle a pregnant wife and a troubled child, but somehow I managed to fit in eight hours of TV a day.

In reply to Re: Re: Re: Can't Automate Login To System by davis
in thread Can't Automate Login To System by Cody Pendant

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.