The 'Basic' HTTP Authentication Scheme
RFC 7617
Document | Type |
RFC - Proposed Standard
(September 2015; No errata)
Obsoletes RFC 2617
|
|
---|---|---|---|
Author | Julian Reschke | ||
Last updated | 2015-10-14 | ||
Replaces | draft-reschke-basicauth-enc, draft-ietf-httpauth-basicauth-enc | ||
Stream | Internent Engineering Task Force (IETF) | ||
Formats | plain text html pdf htmlized (tools) htmlized bibtex | ||
Reviews | |||
Stream | WG state | Submitted to IESG for Publication | |
Document shepherd | Yoav Nir | ||
Shepherd write-up | Show (last changed 2015-01-25) | ||
IESG | IESG state | RFC 7617 (Proposed Standard) | |
Action Holders |
(None)
|
||
Consensus Boilerplate | Yes | ||
Telechat date | |||
Responsible AD | Kathleen Moriarty | ||
Send notices to | (None) | ||
IANA | IANA review state | Version Changed - Review Needed | |
IANA action state | RFC-Ed-Ack |
Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) J. Reschke Request for Comments: 7617 greenbytes Obsoletes: 2617 September 2015 Category: Standards Track ISSN: 2070-1721 The 'Basic' HTTP Authentication Scheme Abstract This document defines the "Basic" Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) authentication scheme, which transmits credentials as user-id/ password pairs, encoded using Base64. Status of This Memo This is an Internet Standards Track document. This document is a product of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). It represents the consensus of the IETF community. It has received public review and has been approved for publication by the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG). Further information on Internet Standards is available in Section 2 of RFC 5741. Information about the current status of this document, any errata, and how to provide feedback on it may be obtained at http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7617. Reschke Standards Track [Page 1] RFC 7617 'Basic' HTTP Authentication Scheme September 2015 Copyright Notice Copyright (c) 2015 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the document authors. All rights reserved. This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal Provisions Relating to IETF Documents (http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of publication of this document. Please review these documents carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect to this document. Code Components extracted from this document must include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as described in the Simplified BSD License. This document may contain material from IETF Documents or IETF Contributions published or made publicly available before November 10, 2008. The person(s) controlling the copyright in some of this material may not have granted the IETF Trust the right to allow modifications of such material outside the IETF Standards Process. Without obtaining an adequate license from the person(s) controlling the copyright in such materials, this document may not be modified outside the IETF Standards Process, and derivative works of it may not be created outside the IETF Standards Process, except to format it for publication as an RFC or to translate it into languages other than English. Table of Contents 1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 1.1. Terminology and Notation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 2. The 'Basic' Authentication Scheme . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 2.1. The 'charset' auth-param . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 2.2. Reusing Credentials . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 3. Internationalization Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 4. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 5. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 6. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 6.1. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 6.2. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 Appendix A. Changes from RFC 2617 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 Appendix B. Deployment Considerations for the 'charset' Parameter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 B.1. User Agents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 B.2. Servers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 B.3. Why not simply switch the default encoding to UTF-8? . . 14 Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 Author's Address . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 Reschke Standards Track [Page 2] RFC 7617 'Basic' HTTP Authentication Scheme September 2015 1. Introduction This document defines the "Basic" Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) authentication scheme, which transmits credentials as user-id/ password pairs, encoded using Base64 (HTTP authentication schemes are defined in [RFC7235]). This scheme is not considered to be a secure method of user authentication unless used in conjunction with some external secure system such as TLS (Transport Layer Security, [RFC5246]), as the user-id and password are passed over the network as cleartext. The "Basic" scheme previously was defined in Section 2 of [RFC2617]. This document updates the definition, and also addresses internationalization issues by introducing the 'charset' authentication parameter (Section 2.1). Other documents updating RFC 2617 are "Hypertext Transfer ProtocolShow full document text