Basic access authentication

Access control method for the HTTP network communication protocol / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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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 ID and password joined by a single colon :.

It was originally implemented by Ari Luotonen at CERN in 1993[1] and defined in the HTTP 1.0 specification in 1996.[2] It is specified in RFC 7617 from 2015, which obsoletes RFC 2617 from 1999.