Title: HTTP Authentication: Basic and Digest Access Authentication
Author(s): J. Franks, P. Hallam-Baker, J. Hostetler, S. Lawrence, P. Leach, A. Luotonen, L. Stewart.
Status: DRAFT STANDARD
Date: Jun 1999
Length: 77638
Obsoletes: RFC2069
"HTTP/1.0", includes the specification for a Basic Access Authentication scheme. This scheme is not considered to be a secure method of user authentication (unless used in conjunction with some external secure system such as SSL [5]), as the user name and password are passed over the network as cleartext.
This document also provides the specification for HTTP's authentication framework, the original Basic authentication scheme and a scheme based on cryptographic hashes, referred to as "Digest Access Authentication". It is therefore also intended to serve as a replacement for RFC2069 [6]. Some optional elements specified by RFC2069 have been removed from this specification due to problems found since its publication; other new elements have been added for compatibility, those new elements have been made optional, but are strongly recommended. Like Basic, Digest access authentication verifies that both parties to a communication know a shared secret (a password); unlike Basic, this verification can be done without sending the password in the clear, which is Basic's biggest weakness. As with most other authentication protocols, the greatest sources of risks are usually found not in the core protocol itself but in policies and procedures surrounding its use.
[sh-index] Back to list of manuals
|
| |
