User authentication

• From: Martin Hamilton <martin@mrrl.lut.ac.uk>
• Date: Sat, 06 May 1995 16:12:42 +0100
• To: www-talk@w3.org
• Message-Id: <199505061512.QAA24601@gizmo.lut.ac.uk>

There's been a lot of grumbling about the ease of mail/news forgery 
via WWW browsers, but it would be trivial to add a simple user 
authentication mechanism based on say the POP (RFC 1725) or IMAP (RFC 
1730) protocols

Using the simple (cleartext) POP3 authentication, the entire authentication dialogue need only consist of the following ...

  +OK POP server starting
  user martin
  +OK Password required for martin.
  pass secret
  +OK martin has 3 message(s) (34153 octets).
  quit
  +OK Pop server says bye!

Of course there are fancier scenarios using Kerberos, S/Key ... :-)

Just a thought!

Martin

Received on Saturday, 6 May 1995 11:12:51 UTC