Menu
I need to authenticate a client when he sends a request to an API. The client has an API-token and I was thinking about using the standard Authorization header for sending the token to the server.
Normally this header is used for Basic and Digest authentication. But I don't know if I'm allowed to customize the value of this header and use a custom authentication scheme, e.g:
Authorization: Token 1af538baa9045a84c0e889f672baf83ff24 Would you recommend this or not? Or is there a better approach for sending the token?
285
It is indeed not possible to pass the username and password via query parameters in standard HTTP auth. Instead, you use a special URL format, like this: http://username:[email protected]/ -- this sends the credentials in the standard HTTP "Authorization" header.
The HTTP Authorization request header can be used to provide credentials that authenticate a user agent with a server, allowing access to a protected resource. The Authorization header is usually, but not always, sent after the user agent first attempts to request a protected resource without credentials.
It is a simple authentication scheme built into the HTTP protocol. The client sends HTTP requests with the Authorization header that contains the word Basic, followed by a space and a base64-encoded(non-encrypted) string username: password. For example, to authorize as username / Pa$$w0rd the client would send.
You can create your own custom auth schemas that use the Authorization: header - for example, this is how OAuth works.
As a general rule, if servers or proxies don't understand the values of standard headers, they will leave them alone and ignore them. It is creating your own header keys that can often produce unexpected results - many proxies will strip headers with names they don't recognise.
Having said that, it is possibly a better idea to use cookies to transmit the token, rather than the Authorization: header, for the simple reason that cookies were explicitly designed to carry custom values, whereas the specification for HTTP's built in auth methods does not really say either way - if you want to see exactly what it does say, have a look here.
The other point about this is that many HTTP client libraries have built-in support for Digest and Basic auth but may make life more difficult when trying to set a raw value in the header field, whereas they will all provide easy support for cookies and will allow more or less any value within them.
190
In the case of CROSS ORIGIN request read this:
I faced this situation and at first I chose to use the Authorization Header and later removed it after facing the following issue.
Authorization Header is considered a custom header. So if a cross-domain request is made with the Autorization Header set, the browser first sends a preflight request. A preflight request is an HTTP request by the OPTIONS method, this request strips all the parameters from the request. Your server needs to respond with Access-Control-Allow-Headers Header having the value of your custom header (Authorization header).
So for each request the client (browser) sends, an additional HTTP request(OPTIONS) was being sent by the browser. This deteriorated the performance of my API. You should check if adding this degrades your performance. As a workaround I am sending tokens in http parameters, which I know is not the best way of doing it but I couldn't compromise with the performance.
41
If you love us? You can donate to us via Paypal or buy me a coffee so we can maintain and grow! Thank you!
Donate Us With
