Web server authentication
There are many ways to authenticate web services, and the failure of some of them has presented some painful lessons on how not to implement authentication, such as the Yahoo breach in 2017 where usernames and passwords were stored on servers in clear text. There was also the Twitter breach of 2018, where a misconfiguration stored unmasked passwords in an internal log, making all user passwords accessible and viewable on their network. Or the Ashley Madison breach of 2015, where account passwords on the live site were hashed using a weak algorithm, and a security researcher used the Hashcat password recovery tool with a dictionary based on RockYou passwords, finding approximately 4,000 passwords. These are just a couple of stories of data breaches related to bad password management and security. Now, let’s take a look at some of the most common authentication methods currently in use for web services.
Basic authentication
As the name states, this...