Authentication with blank password

I’m developing an application that uses openfire’s custom authentication to initiate an authenticate api request to an external server. However, I’m noticing that when I try to establish a connection with Openfire, and pass in the blank password that I want to use in my authenticate api request, Openfire seems to swallow the request and my custom auth provider class is not even called by Openfire.

Does any one know what is causing this?

Thanks,

Conrad