Populate Form In Iframe Of External Website

I am trying to write a php page that will load several different websites in different iframes. Several of those sites will need the user to login. What I need to do is basically a

Solution 1:

that depends.

if those sites share a domain (the parent window and iframes), then it's possible for the top window to communicate with the child iframes. AJAX prevents cross domain (that includes inter subdomains) but iframes can communicate as long as they belong to the same top domain.

see https://stackoverflow.com/a/9338955/575527 and https://stackoverflow.com/a/9676156/575527

a better approach is to have a "top domain cookie" where that cookie is visible in all those iframes (assuming they are of the same top domain). login once using a single login page, then subsequent requests in the pages will need to check the cookie vs the session if that user is logged in.

or if those pages have different domains but access the same database, then one can just then pass the session id as a url parameter to the iframes rather than as cookies. then the website in the iframes will parse the session id and check in the database if those sessions are valid, are current, and are logged in.

all of which need additional CSRF and XSS checking as session IDs are in the open.

Solution 2:

You cannot do what you describe in JavaScript.

However, depending on what you need to do with the data/websites once the user is logged in, you may be able to use a remote POST to simulate that behavior. See this question for more info.