Time for action – exploring Basic authentication

HTTP Basic authentication supports the following auth_param options:

auth_param basic program COMMAND
auth_param basic utf8 on|off
auth_param basic children NUMBER [startup=N] [idle=N] [concurrency=N]
auth_param basic realm STRING
auth_param basic credentialsttl TIME_TO_LIVE
auth_param basic casesensitive on|off

Now let's discuss what each parameter specifies and what possible values can be passed with it.

Note

Please note that the options startup, idle, and concurrency are available only in Squid version 3.2 or later.

The program parameter specifies the absolute path to the authentication helper we are trying to configure. We should note that, we can also specify additional arguments to the program on the same line. By default, all the authentication helpers reside in ${prefix}/libexec/ where ${prefix} is the value supplied to the --prefix option while running the configure program.

The aforementioned code is given the username password string...