HTTP authentication

This document specifies an authentication scheme for the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) that is referred to as either the Mutual authentication scheme or the Mutual authentication protocol. This scheme provides true mutual authentication between an HTTP client and an HTTP server using password-based authentication. Unlike the Basic and Digest authentication schemes, the Mutual authentication scheme specified in this document assures the user that the server truly knows the user's encrypted password.

This document specifies cryptographic algorithms for use with the Mutual user authentication method for the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP).

This document specifies extensions for the HTTP authentication framework for interactive clients. Currently, fundamental features of HTTP-level authentication are insufficient for complex requirements of various Web-based applications. This forces these applications to implement their own authentication frameworks by means such as HTML forms, which becomes one of the hurdles against introducing secure authentication mechanisms handled jointly by servers and user agents. The extended framework fills gaps between Web application requirements and HTTP authentication provisions to solve the above problems, while maintaining compatibility with existing Web and non-Web uses of HTTP authentication.

This specification describes a family of HTTP authentication mechanisms called the Salted Challenge Response Authentication Mechanism (SCRAM), which provides a more robust authentication mechanism than a plaintext password protected by Transport Layer Security (TLS) and avoids the deployment obstacles presented by earlier TLS-protected challenge response authentication mechanisms.

The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) provides a simple challenge- response authentication mechanism that may be used by a server to challenge a client request and by a client to provide authentication information. This document defines the HTTP Digest Authentication scheme that can be used with the HTTP authentication mechanism.

This document defines the "Basic" Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) authentication scheme, which transmits credentials as user-id/ password pairs, encoded using Base64.