GENWiki

Premier IT Outsourcing and Support Services within the UK

User Tools

Site Tools


rfc:rfc7617

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 Protocol
 (HTTP/1.1): Authentication" ([RFC7235], defining the authentication
 framework), "HTTP Digest Access Authentication" ([RFC7616], updating
 the definition of the "Digest" authentication scheme), and "HTTP
 Authentication-Info and Proxy-Authentication-Info Response Header
 Fields" ([RFC7615]).  Taken together, these four documents obsolete
 RFC 2617.

1.1. Terminology and Notation

 The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT",
 "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this
 document are to be interpreted as described in [RFC2119].
 The terms "protection space" and "realm" are defined in Section 2.2
 of [RFC7235].
 The terms "(character) repertoire" and "character encoding scheme"
 are defined in Section 2 of [RFC6365].

2. The 'Basic' Authentication Scheme

 The Basic authentication scheme is based on the model that the client
 needs to authenticate itself with a user-id and a password for each
 protection space ("realm").  The realm value is a free-form string
 that can only be compared for equality with other realms on that
 server.  The server will service the request only if it can validate
 the user-id and password for the protection space applying to the
 requested resource.

Reschke Standards Track [Page 3] RFC 7617 'Basic' HTTP Authentication Scheme September 2015

 The Basic authentication scheme utilizes the Authentication Framework
 as follows.
 In challenges:
 o  The scheme name is "Basic".
 o  The authentication parameter 'realm' is REQUIRED ([RFC7235],
    Section 2.2).
 o  The authentication parameter 'charset' is OPTIONAL (see
    Section 2.1).
 o  No other authentication parameters are defined -- unknown
    parameters MUST be ignored by recipients, and new parameters can
    only be defined by revising this specification.
 See also Section 4.1 of [RFC7235], which discusses the complexity of
 parsing challenges properly.
 Note that both scheme and parameter names are matched case-
 insensitively.
 For credentials, the "token68" syntax defined in Section 2.1 of
 [RFC7235] is used.  The value is computed based on user-id and
 password as defined below.
 Upon receipt of a request for a URI within the protection space that
 lacks credentials, the server can reply with a challenge using the
 401 (Unauthorized) status code ([RFC7235], Section 3.1) and the
 WWW-Authenticate header field ([RFC7235], Section 4.1).
 For instance:
    HTTP/1.1 401 Unauthorized
    Date: Mon, 04 Feb 2014 16:50:53 GMT
    WWW-Authenticate: Basic realm="WallyWorld"
 where "WallyWorld" is the string assigned by the server to identify
 the protection space.
 A proxy can respond with a similar challenge using the 407 (Proxy
 Authentication Required) status code ([RFC7235], Section 3.2) and the
 Proxy-Authenticate header field ([RFC7235], Section 4.3).

Reschke Standards Track [Page 4] RFC 7617 'Basic' HTTP Authentication Scheme September 2015

 To receive authorization, the client
 1.  obtains the user-id and password from the user,
 2.  constructs the user-pass by concatenating the user-id, a single
     colon (":") character, and the password,
 3.  encodes the user-pass into an octet sequence (see below for a
     discussion of character encoding schemes),
 4.  and obtains the basic-credentials by encoding this octet sequence
     using Base64 ([RFC4648], Section 4) into a sequence of US-ASCII
     characters ([RFC0020]).
 The original definition of this authentication scheme failed to
 specify the character encoding scheme used to convert the user-pass
 into an octet sequence.  In practice, most implementations chose
 either a locale-specific encoding such as ISO-8859-1 ([ISO-8859-1]),
 or UTF-8 ([RFC3629]).  For backwards compatibility reasons, this
 specification continues to leave the default encoding undefined, as
 long as it is compatible with US-ASCII (mapping any US-ASCII
 character to a single octet matching the US-ASCII character code).
 The user-id and password MUST NOT contain any control characters (see
 "CTL" in Appendix B.1 of [RFC5234]).
 Furthermore, a user-id containing a colon character is invalid, as
 the first colon in a user-pass string separates user-id and password
 from one another; text after the first colon is part of the password.
 User-ids containing colons cannot be encoded in user-pass strings.
 Note that many user agents produce user-pass strings without checking
 that user-ids supplied by users do not contain colons; recipients
 will then treat part of the username input as part of the password.
 If the user agent wishes to send the user-id "Aladdin" and password
 "open sesame", it would use the following header field:
    Authorization: Basic QWxhZGRpbjpvcGVuIHNlc2FtZQ==

2.1. The 'charset' auth-param

 In challenges, servers can use the 'charset' authentication parameter
 to indicate the character encoding scheme they expect the user agent
 to use when generating "user-pass" (a sequence of octets).  This
 information is purely advisory.

Reschke Standards Track [Page 5] RFC 7617 'Basic' HTTP Authentication Scheme September 2015

 The only allowed value is "UTF-8"; it is to be matched case-
 insensitively (see [RFC2978], Section 2.3).  It indicates that the
 server expects character data to be converted to Unicode
 Normalization Form C ("NFC"; see Section 3 of [RFC5198]) and to be
 encoded into octets using the UTF-8 character encoding scheme
 ([RFC3629]).
 For the user-id, recipients MUST support all characters defined in
 the "UsernameCasePreserved" profile defined in Section 3.3 of
 [RFC7613], with the exception of the colon (":") character.
 For the password, recipients MUST support all characters defined in
 the "OpaqueString" profile defined in Section 4.2 of [RFC7613].
 Other values are reserved for future use.
    Note: The 'charset' is only defined on challenges, as Basic
    authentication uses a single token for credentials ('token68'
    syntax); thus, the credentials syntax isn't extensible.
    Note: The name 'charset' has been chosen for consistency with
    Section 2.1.1 of [RFC2831].  A better name would have been
    'accept-charset', as it is not about the message it appears in,
    but the server's expectation.
 In the example below, the server prompts for authentication in the
 "foo" realm, using Basic authentication, with a preference for the
 UTF-8 character encoding scheme:
    WWW-Authenticate: Basic realm="foo", charset="UTF-8"
 Note that the parameter value can be either a token or a quoted
 string; in this case, the server chose to use the quoted-string
 notation.
 The user's name is "test", and the password is the string "123"
 followed by the Unicode character U+00A3 (POUND SIGN).  Using the
 character encoding scheme UTF-8, the user-pass becomes:
    't' 'e' 's' 't' ':' '1' '2' '3' pound
    74  65  73  74  3A  31  32  33  C2  A3
 Encoding this octet sequence in Base64 ([RFC4648], Section 4) yields:
    dGVzdDoxMjPCow==

Reschke Standards Track [Page 6] RFC 7617 'Basic' HTTP Authentication Scheme September 2015

 Thus, the Authorization header field would be:
    Authorization: Basic dGVzdDoxMjPCow==
 Or, for proxy authentication:
    Proxy-Authorization: Basic dGVzdDoxMjPCow==

2.2. Reusing Credentials

 Given the absolute URI ([RFC3986], Section 4.3) of an authenticated
 request, the authentication scope of that request is obtained by
 removing all characters after the last slash ("/") character of the
 path component ("hier_part"; see [RFC3986], Section 3).  A client
 SHOULD assume that resources identified by URIs with a prefix-match
 of the authentication scope are also within the protection space
 specified by the realm value of that authenticated request.
 A client MAY preemptively send the corresponding Authorization header
 field with requests for resources in that space without receipt of
 another challenge from the server.  Similarly, when a client sends a
 request to a proxy, it MAY reuse a user-id and password in the Proxy-
 Authorization header field without receiving another challenge from
 the proxy server.
 For example, given an authenticated request to:
    http://example.com/docs/index.html
 requests to the URIs below could use the known credentials:
    http://example.com/docs/
    http://example.com/docs/test.doc
    http://example.com/docs/?page=1
 while the URIs
    http://example.com/other/
    https://example.com/docs/
 would be considered to be outside the authentication scope.
 Note that a URI can be part of multiple authentication scopes (such
 as "http://example.com/" and "http://example.com/docs/").  This
 specification does not define which of these should be treated with
 higher priority.

Reschke Standards Track [Page 7] RFC 7617 'Basic' HTTP Authentication Scheme September 2015

3. Internationalization Considerations

 User-ids or passwords containing characters outside the US-ASCII
 character repertoire will cause interoperability issues, unless both
 communication partners agree on what character encoding scheme is to
 be used.  Servers can use the new 'charset' parameter (Section 2.1)
 to indicate a preference of "UTF-8", increasing the probability that
 clients will switch to that encoding.
 The 'realm' parameter carries data that can be considered textual;
 however, [RFC7235] does not define a way to reliably transport non-
 US-ASCII characters.  This is a known issue that would need to be
 addressed in a revision to that specification.

4. Security Considerations

 The Basic authentication scheme is not a secure method of user
 authentication, nor does it in any way protect the entity, which is
 transmitted in cleartext across the physical network used as the
 carrier.  HTTP does not prevent the addition of enhancements (such as
 schemes to use one-time passwords) to Basic authentication.
 The most serious flaw of Basic authentication is that it results in
 the cleartext transmission of the user's password over the physical
 network.  Many other authentication schemes address this problem.
 Because Basic authentication involves the cleartext transmission of
 passwords, it SHOULD NOT be used (without enhancements such as HTTPS
 [RFC2818]) to protect sensitive or valuable information.
 A common use of Basic authentication is for identification purposes
 -- requiring the user to provide a user-id and password as a means of
 identification, for example, for purposes of gathering accurate usage
 statistics on a server.  When used in this way it is tempting to
 think that there is no danger in its use if illicit access to the
 protected documents is not a major concern.  This is only correct if
 the server issues both user-id and password to the users and, in
 particular, does not allow the user to choose his or her own
 password.  The danger arises because naive users frequently reuse a
 single password to avoid the task of maintaining multiple passwords.
 If a server permits users to select their own passwords, then the
 threat is not only unauthorized access to documents on the server but
 also unauthorized access to any other resources on other systems that
 the user protects with the same password.  Furthermore, in the
 server's password database, many of the passwords may also be users'
 passwords for other sites.  The owner or administrator of such a
 system could therefore expose all users of the system to the risk of

Reschke Standards Track [Page 8] RFC 7617 'Basic' HTTP Authentication Scheme September 2015

 unauthorized access to all those other sites if this information is
 not maintained in a secure fashion.  This raises both security and
 privacy concerns ([RFC6973]).  If the same user-id and password
 combination is in use to access other accounts, such as an email or
 health portal account, personal information could be exposed.
 Basic authentication is also vulnerable to spoofing by counterfeit
 servers.  If a user can be led to believe that she is connecting to a
 host containing information protected by Basic authentication when,
 in fact, she is connecting to a hostile server or gateway, then the
 attacker can request a password, store it for later use, and feign an
 error.  Server implementers ought to guard against this sort of
 counterfeiting; in particular, software components that can take over
 control over the message framing on an existing connection need to be
 used carefully or not at all (for instance: NPH ("Non-Parsed Header")
 scripts as described in Section 5 of [RFC3875]).
 Servers and proxies implementing Basic authentication need to store
 user passwords in some form in order to authenticate a request.
 These passwords ought to be stored in such a way that a leak of the
 password data doesn't make them trivially recoverable.  This is
 especially important when users are allowed to set their own
 passwords, since users are known to choose weak passwords and to
 reuse them across authentication realms.  While a full discussion of
 good password hashing techniques is beyond the scope of this
 document, server operators ought to make an effort to minimize risks
 to their users in the event of a password data leak.  For example,
 servers ought to avoid storing user passwords in plaintext or as
 unsalted digests.  For more discussion about modern password hashing
 techniques, see the "Password Hashing Competition"
 (<https://password-hashing.net>).
 The use of the UTF-8 character encoding scheme and of normalization
 introduces additional security considerations; see Section 10 of
 [RFC3629] and Section 6 of [RFC5198] for more information.

5. IANA Considerations

 IANA maintains the "Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) Authentication
 Scheme Registry" ([RFC7235]) at <http://www.iana.org/assignments/
 http-authschemes>.
 The entry for the "Basic" authentication scheme has been updated to
 reference this specification.

Reschke Standards Track [Page 9] RFC 7617 'Basic' HTTP Authentication Scheme September 2015

6. References

6.1. Normative References

 [RFC20]    Cerf, V., "ASCII format for network interchange", STD 80,
            RFC 20, DOI 10.17487/RFC0020, October 1969,
            <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc20>.
 [RFC2119]  Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate
            Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119,
            DOI 10.17487/RFC2119, March 1997,
            <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc2119>.
 [RFC2978]  Freed, N. and J. Postel, "IANA Charset Registration
            Procedures", BCP 19, RFC 2978, DOI 10.17487/RFC2978,
            October 2000, <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc2978>.
 [RFC3629]  Yergeau, F., "UTF-8, a transformation format of ISO
            10646", STD 63, RFC 3629, DOI 10.17487/RFC3629, November
            2003, <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc3629>.
 [RFC3986]  Berners-Lee, T., Fielding, R., and L. Masinter, "Uniform
            Resource Identifier (URI): Generic Syntax", STD 66,
            RFC 3986, DOI 10.17487/RFC3986, January 2005,
            <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc3986>.
 [RFC4648]  Josefsson, S., "The Base16, Base32, and Base64 Data
            Encodings", RFC 4648, DOI 10.17487/RFC4648, October 2006,
            <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc4648>.
 [RFC5198]  Klensin, J. and M. Padlipsky, "Unicode Format for Network
            Interchange", RFC 5198, DOI 10.17487/RFC5198, March 2008,
            <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc5198>.
 [RFC5234]  Crocker, D., Ed. and P. Overell, "Augmented BNF for Syntax
            Specifications: ABNF", STD 68, RFC 5234,
            DOI 10.17487/RFC5234, January 2008,
            <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc5234>.
 [RFC6365]  Hoffman, P. and J. Klensin, "Terminology Used in
            Internationalization in the IETF", BCP 166, RFC 6365,
            DOI 10.17487/RFC6365, September 2011,
            <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc6365>.
 [RFC7235]  Fielding, R., Ed. and J. Reschke, Ed., "Hypertext Transfer
            Protocol (HTTP/1.1): Authentication", RFC 7235,
            DOI 10.17487/RFC7235, June 2014,
            <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7235>.

Reschke Standards Track [Page 10] RFC 7617 'Basic' HTTP Authentication Scheme September 2015

 [RFC7613]  Saint-Andre, P. and A. Melnikov, "Preparation,
            Enforcement, and Comparison of Internationalized Strings
            Representing Usernames and Passwords", RFC 7613,
            DOI 10.17487/RFC7613, August 2015,
            <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7613>.

6.2. Informative References

 [ISO-8859-1]
            International Organization for Standardization,
            "Information technology -- 8-bit single-byte coded graphic
            character sets -- Part 1: Latin alphabet No. 1", ISO/IEC
            8859-1:1998, 1998.
 [RFC2617]  Franks, J., Hallam-Baker, P., Hostetler, J., Lawrence, S.,
            Leach, P., Luotonen, A., and L. Stewart, "HTTP
            Authentication: Basic and Digest Access Authentication",
            RFC 2617, DOI 10.17487/RFC2617, June 1999,
            <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc2617>.
 [RFC2818]  Rescorla, E., "HTTP Over TLS", RFC 2818,
            DOI 10.17487/RFC2818, May 2000,
            <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc2818>.
 [RFC2831]  Leach, P. and C. Newman, "Using Digest Authentication as a
            SASL Mechanism", RFC 2831, DOI 10.17487/RFC2831, May 2000,
            <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc2831>.
 [RFC3875]  Robinson, D. and K. Coar, "The Common Gateway Interface
            (CGI) Version 1.1", RFC 3875, DOI 10.17487/RFC3875,
            October 2004, <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc3875>.
 [RFC5246]  Dierks, T. and E. Rescorla, "The Transport Layer Security
            (TLS) Protocol Version 1.2", RFC 5246,
            DOI 10.17487/RFC5246, August 2008,
            <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc5246>.
 [RFC6973]  Cooper, A., Tschofenig, H., Aboba, B., Peterson, J.,
            Morris, J., Hansen, M., and R. Smith, "Privacy
            Considerations for Internet Protocols", RFC 6973,
            DOI 10.17487/RFC6973, July 2013,
            <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc6973>.
 [RFC7231]  Fielding, R., Ed. and J. Reschke, Ed., "Hypertext Transfer
            Protocol (HTTP/1.1): Semantics and Content", RFC 7231,
            DOI 10.17487/RFC7231, June 2014,
            <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7231>.

Reschke Standards Track [Page 11] RFC 7617 'Basic' HTTP Authentication Scheme September 2015

 [RFC7615]  Reschke, J., "HTTP Authentication-Info and Proxy-
            Authentication-Info Response Header Fields", RFC 7615,
            DOI 10.17487/RFC7615, September 2015,
            <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7615>.
 [RFC7616]  Shekh-Yusef, R., Ed., Ahrens, D., and S. Bremer, "HTTP
            Digest Access Authentication", RFC 7616,
            DOI 10.17487/RFC7616, September 2015,
            <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7616>.

Reschke Standards Track [Page 12] RFC 7617 'Basic' HTTP Authentication Scheme September 2015

Appendix A. Changes from RFC 2617

 The scheme definition has been rewritten to be consistent with newer
 specifications such as [RFC7235].
 The new authentication parameter 'charset' has been added.  It is
 purely advisory, so existing implementations do not need to change,
 unless they want to take advantage of the additional information that
 previously wasn't available.

Appendix B. Deployment Considerations for the 'charset' Parameter

B.1. User Agents

 User agents not implementing 'charset' will continue to work as
 before, ignoring the new parameter.
 User agents that already default to the UTF-8 encoding implement
 'charset' by definition.
 Other user agents can keep their default behavior and switch to UTF-8
 when seeing the new parameter.

B.2. Servers

 Servers that do not support non-US-ASCII characters in credentials do
 not require any changes to support 'charset'.
 Servers that need to support non-US-ASCII characters, but cannot use
 the UTF-8 character encoding scheme will not be affected; they will
 continue to function as well or as badly as before.
 Finally, servers that need to support non-US-ASCII characters and can
 use the UTF-8 character encoding scheme can opt in by specifying the
 'charset' parameter in the authentication challenge.  Clients that do
 understand the 'charset' parameter will then start to use UTF-8,
 while other clients will continue to send credentials in their
 default encoding, broken credentials, or no credentials at all.
 Until all clients are upgraded to support UTF-8, servers are likely
 to see both UTF-8 and "legacy" encodings in requests.  When
 processing as UTF-8 fails (due to a failure to decode as UTF-8 or a
 mismatch of user-id/password), a server might try a fallback to the
 previously supported legacy encoding in order to accommodate these
 legacy clients.  Note that implicit retries need to be done
 carefully; for instance, some subsystems might detect repeated login
 failures and treat them as a potential credentials-guessing attack.

Reschke Standards Track [Page 13] RFC 7617 'Basic' HTTP Authentication Scheme September 2015

B.3. Why not simply switch the default encoding to UTF-8?

 There are sites in use today that default to a local character
 encoding scheme, such as ISO-8859-1 ([ISO-8859-1]), and expect user
 agents to use that encoding.  Authentication on these sites will stop
 working if the user agent switches to a different encoding, such as
 UTF-8.
 Note that sites might even inspect the User-Agent header field
 ([RFC7231], Section 5.5.3) to decide which character encoding scheme
 to expect from the client.  Therefore, they might support UTF-8 for
 some user agents, but default to something else for others.  User
 agents in the latter group will have to continue to do what they do
 today until the majority of these servers have been upgraded to
 always use UTF-8.

Acknowledgements

 This specification takes over the definition of the "Basic" HTTP
 Authentication Scheme, previously defined in RFC 2617.  We thank John
 Franks, Phillip M. Hallam-Baker, Jeffery L. Hostetler, Scott
 D. Lawrence, Paul J. Leach, Ari Luotonen, and Lawrence C. Stewart for
 their work on that specification, from which significant amounts of
 text were borrowed.  See Section 6 of [RFC2617] for further
 acknowledgements.
 The internationalization problem with respect to the character
 encoding scheme used for user-pass was reported as a Mozilla bug back
 in the year 2000 (see
 <https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=41489> and also the
 more recent <https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=656213>).
 It was Andrew Clover's idea to address it using a new auth-param.
 We also thank the members of the HTTPAUTH Working Group and other
 reviewers, namely, Stephen Farrell, Roy Fielding, Daniel Kahn
 Gillmor, Tony Hansen, Bjoern Hoehrmann, Kari Hurtta, Amos Jeffries,
 Benjamin Kaduk, Michael Koeller, Eric Lawrence, Barry Leiba, James
 Manger, Alexey Melnikov, Kathleen Moriarty, Juergen Schoenwaelder,
 Yaron Sheffer, Meral Shirazipour, Michael Sweet, and Martin Thomson
 for feedback on this revision.

Reschke Standards Track [Page 14] RFC 7617 'Basic' HTTP Authentication Scheme September 2015

Author's Address

 Julian F. Reschke
 greenbytes GmbH
 Hafenweg 16
 Muenster, NW  48155
 Germany
 Email: julian.reschke@greenbytes.de
 URI:   http://greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/

Reschke Standards Track [Page 15]

/data/webs/external/dokuwiki/data/pages/rfc/rfc7617.txt · Last modified: 2015/09/30 23:24 by 127.0.0.1

Donate Powered by PHP Valid HTML5 Valid CSS Driven by DokuWiki