[9881] in www-talk@info.cern.ch
Re: custom authentication functions
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (George Phillips)
Tue Mar 26 16:14:24 1996
To: hgoldber@nedhmail.nedh.harvard.edu
Cc: www-talk@w3.org
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 26 Mar 1996 10:05:01 PST."
<9602268278.AA827873677@nedhmail.nedh.harvard.edu>
Date: Tue, 26 Mar 1996 05:07:49 -0800
From: George Phillips <phillips@nsg.bc.ca>
Resent-From: www-talk@w3.org
I've written CGI scripts which do Basic level authentication. The only
catch is that servers seem to keep HTTP_AUTHENTICATE to themselves and
not pass the variable on to the script, even if the server is not doing
authentication on that URL space. That was only under NCSA 1.3 and 1.5;
other servers may handle that correctly. They should be passing the
information on, but I'd guess that so few people tried to do authentication
under CGI that it was never noticed.
Otherwise, the rest is just a matter of following the HTTP protocol and
knowing how to decode the user:password string.
-- George
