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Digest Access Authentication

KZero Staff
Oct 22, 2023

Digest Access Authentication is a simple HTTP-based challenge/response method. According to RFC 2069 standard, it uses an MD5 hash algorithm to encode the username, realm, password, digest URI and server-generated nonce.

Digest Access Authentication scheme is quite similar to the Basic scheme. As mentioned, Digest Access Authentication uses Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and was originally specified in RFC 2069, which states that the security of a scheme must be handled by a nonce code generated by a server.

The process of Digital Access Authentication follows these steps:

  1. A client requests access to a website with credentials
  2. A server responds with a key digest, a nonce authentication request, or a 401.
  3. The client sends to the server a response with username, realm, and password, and encrypts the data using MD5.
  4. The server looks up the password in the database using the username and realm
  5. The server uses that password to generate an MD5 key
KZero Staff

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