Handling NTLM Proxies on Android Without Rooting

This might be a bit of a bugbear if you’ve tried using your Android tablet on the Wi-Fi at work only to find that the corporate proxy server uses NTLM (NT LAN Manager) authentication instead of basic or plain text authentication. Android doesn’t have native support for NTLM authentication for proxy server which means that your tablet will be limited to accessing intranet content only.

Of course, there are numerous solution that work but pretty much all of  them require you to root your Android device which will often be against the information security policy of most organisations (if they are mature enough to have one). Having a rooted device can potentially open up a given device to more damaging malware given the rights that an app can be granted beyond the limited ones that normal apps can request.

Anyway, a bright spark at XDA Developers wrote an app called Drony that will handle NTLM proxy authentication and run a proxy internally on the device (essentially creating a double proxy connection). The kicker here is that your device won’t need to be rooted and all you need to do is configure the proxy for your corporate Wi-Fi connection to point to 127.0.0.1 or localhost and the corresponding port (the default is 8020).

What I really like about Drony is that it will automatically kick in when you connect to your desired Wi-Fi connection(s) that you configure for an NTLM proxy and then it will disengage when you disconnect from it. This will save you the hassle of switching the internal proxy on and off making it a real snap to use.

Anyway, if you want to give it a try you can grab Drony here for free on the Google Play store – it worked fine for me on my Nexus 7 running Android 4.3 but your mileage may vary on older versions of Android.