RESTful Java Web Services, Second Edition

HTTP basic authentication

Basic HTTP authentication works by sending the Base64 encoded username and the password as a pair in the HTTP authorization header. The username and password must be sent for every HTTP request made by the client. A typical HTTP basic authentication transaction can be depicted with the following sequence diagram. In this example, the client is trying to access a protected RESTful web service endpoint (/webresources/departments) to retrieve department details:

This diagram represents a whole transaction. A client begins by requesting the URI, /webresources/departments. Because the resource is secured using HTTP basic authentication ...