The LDAP authentication is one of the most popular authentication mechanism around the world for enterprise application and Active directory (an LDAP implementation by Microsoft for Windows) is another widely used LDAP server. In many projects, we need to authenticate against active directory using LDAP by credentials provided in the login screen. Sometimes this simple task gets tricky because of various issues faced during implementation and integration and no standard way of doing LDAP authentication in a Java web application. Even though Java provides LDAP support but in this article, I will mostly talk about spring security because of it's my preferred Java framework for authentication, authorization, and security-related stuff.