Basic and Digest mixed authentication with WebAPI

In my last post I talked about using both Basic and Digest authentication with WebAPI, but not at the same time. So what do you do when you want to used mixed authentication with both?

In principal you can support both Basic and Digest authentication at the same time, but your server has to issue the 401 challenge with Digest. This is because basic requires no token or server information to authenticate, where as digest requires a nonce from the server.

I have updated Rick's Basic authentication and Badri's Digest authentication implementation to work together as a pair of AuthorizationFilterAttributes. Here is the source:

• DigestAuthDemo on GitHub

public static class WebApiConfig

{

    public static void Register(HttpConfiguration config)

    {

        config.Filters.Add(new BasicAuthorizationFilterAttribute(false));

        config.Filters.Add(new DigestAuthorizationFilterAttribute());

        config.MapHttpAttributeRoutes();

        config.Routes.MapHttpRoute(

            "DefaultApi",

            "{controller}/{id}",

            new { controller = "data", id = RouteParameter.Optional }

        );

    }

}

Enjoy,
Tom

WebAPI and Chrome Authentication Types

Google Chrome supports four HTTP authentication types:

1. Basic
2. Digest
3. NTLM
4. Negotiate

ASP.NET WebAPI has AuthorizationFilterAttributes which can be used to implement both Authentication and Authorization for your APIs. If you want to use Basic or Digest authentication, there are already several open source implementations available to help you out!

• Rick Strahl - WebAPI Basic Authentication Authorization Filter
• Badri - Digest Authentication with ASP.NET Web API

Do you need to used mixed authentication and support both Basic and Digest?
If so, be sure to check out my next blog post...

Enjoy,
Tom

Python 2.6 and HTTP Basic Authentication

I recently encountered an issue where adding basic authentication to some HTTP calls was breaking a Python application.

Come to find out there is a bug in Python 2.6 that appends a newline character to base 64 encoded strings. That newline character then causes your HTTP request to be malformed, so that the body does not match the content length. When consuming these malformed requests in an ASP.NET sever the body content would cut off early, and in the case of JSON content this made it so that the JSON string was incomplete and could not be parsed.

So what's the fix? You can either update Python, or fix your string after encoding.

Enjoy,
Tom