I-D ACTION:draft-ietf-http-authentication-02.txt

A New Internet-Draft is available from the on-line Internet-Drafts directories.
This draft is a work item of the HyperText Transfer Protocol Working Group of the IETF.

	Title		: HTTP Authentication: Basic and Digest Access 
                          Authentication
	Author(s)	: J. Franks, E. Sink, P. Leach, J. Hostetler, 
                          P. Hallam-Baker, L. Stewart, S. Lawrence
	Filename	: draft-ietf-http-authentication-02.txt
	Pages		: 29
	Date		: 11-Aug-98
	
'HTTP/1.0' includes the specification for a Basic Access Authentication^M
scheme. This scheme is not considered to be a secure method of user^M
authentication (unless used in conjunction with some external secure^M
system such as SSL [5]), as the user name and password are passed over^M
the network as cleartext.^M
 
This document also provides the specification for HTTP's authentication^M
framework, the original Basic authentication scheme and a scheme based^M
on cryptographic hashes, referred to as 'Digest Access Authentication'.^M
It is therefore also intended to serve as a replacement for RFC 2069^M
[6].  Some optional elements specified by RFC 2069 have been removed^M
from this specification due to problems found since its publication;^M
other new elements have been added -for compatibility, those new^M
elements have been made optional, but are strongly recommended.^M
 
Like Basic, Digest access authentication verifies that both parties to a^M
communication know a shared secret (a password); unlike Basic, this^M
verification can be done without sending the password in the clear,^M
which is Basic's biggest weakness. As with most other authentication^M
protocols, the greatest sources of risks are usually found not in the^M
core protocol itself but in policies and procedures surrounding its use.

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