Re: Basic authentication/encryption methodology

Roy T. Fielding (fielding@avron.ics.uci.edu)
Sun, 26 Feb 1995 03:35:23 +0500

> I apologize to those of you to whom this request is inappropriate, but
> I'm stumped. I'm having a truly terrible time trying to determine what
> the real algorithm is for basic authentication. The 1.0 draft says uuencoded,
> the Cern pages refer me to 1421, but when I try these approaches the output
> doesn't match the encoding created by current browsers. I know I'm
> missing something really basic. If someone with more knowledge and a
> clearer head would throw me some pointers I'd really appreciate it.

The correct algorithm is base64 -- the same base64 that is described
in the MIME spec (RFC 1521) and PEM (RFC 1421), but without any line breaks.
This is fully described in the next revision of the HTTP/1.0 draft.

.....Roy Fielding ICS Grad Student, University of California, Irvine USA
<fielding@ics.uci.edu>
<URL:http://www.ics.uci.edu/dir/grad/Software/fielding>