Lesson plan

Basic access authentication

In the context of an HTTP transaction, basic access authentication is a method for an HTTP user agent (e.g. a web browser) to provide a user name and password when making a request. In basic HTTP authentication, a request contains a header field in the form of Authorization: Basic <credentials> , where <credentials> is the Base64 encoding of user name and password joined by a single colon : . It was originally implemented by Ari Luotonen at CERN in 1993 and defined in the HTTP 1.0 specification in 1996. It is specified in from 2015, which obsoletes from 1999.

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Article summary

In the context of an HTTP transaction, basic access authentication is a method for an HTTP user agent (e.g. a web browser) to provide a user name and password when making a request. In basic HTTP authentication, a request contains a header field in the form of Authorization: Basic <credentials> , where <credentials> is the Base64 encoding of user name and password joined by a single colon : . It was originally implemented by Ari Luotonen at CERN in 1993 and defined in the HTTP 1.0 specification in 1996. It is specified in from 2015, which obsoletes from 1999.

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  1. Summarise the article in your own words. Which single claim would you verify first, and why?
  2. Which claim in this article is most likely to be revised as the sources update? How would you check its current status?
  3. If two sources disagreed about one of these facts, what would you need in order to trust one over the other?

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