Implementing Basic Authentication

The Basic Authentication standard has been in place since the 1990s and can be the simplest way to provide a user login. When used over HTTP, it is in no way secure since a plain text password is sent over the connection from the browser to the server.

Note

For information on Basic Authentication, visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_authentication.

However, when coupled with SSL (HTTPS), Basic Authentication can be a useful method if we're not concerned about a custom-styled login form.

Note

We will discuss SSL/TLS (HTTPS) in the Setting up an HTTPS web server recipe of this chapter. For additional information, visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSL/TLS.

In this recipe, we'll learn how to initiate and process a Basic Access Authentication request over plain HTTP. In the following recipes, we'll implement an HTTPS server and see an advancement of Basic Authentication (Digest Authentication).

Getting ready

We just need to create a new server.js file in a new...