Basic authentication is a type of access control mostly used in internal environments to restrict access to restricted areas in a website. It has a lot of weaknesses, including the following:
- The basic authentication sends the information in plain text. This means that a malicious user can intercept the information sent by the client to the server and extract the credentials.
- The password is protected by a Base64 encoding. It does not mean that the password is encrypted; anyone can get the plain password using a decoder, like the one included in Burp Suite, as shown in the following screenshot:
