Using the RESTful Web Services module, we define specific supported authentication providers for an endpoint. The Drupal core provides a cookie provider, which authenticates through a valid cookie, such as your regular login experience. Then, there is the HTTP Basic Authentication module to support HTTP authentication headers.
There are alternatives that provide more robust authentication methods. With cookie-based authentication, you will need to use CSRF tokens to prevent unrequested page loads by an unauthorized party. When you use the HTTP authentication, you are sending a password for each request in the request header.
OAuth is a popular and open authorization framework. It is a proper authentication method that uses tokens and not passwords. In this recipe, we will implement the Simple OAuth module to provide OAuth 2.0 authentication for GET and POST requests...