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 | IETF | ||
| Formats | plain text html pdf 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) | |
| 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
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described in the Simplified BSD License.
This document may contain material from IETF Documents or IETF
Contributions published or made publicly available before November
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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 Protocol
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