Authentication is the process of verifying the identity or authenticity of a person or an entity. Let's go back to the time that the world was not yet introduced to computers and the internet. If a customer of a bank had to withdraw some money from the branch, how would it take place? The teller at the branch would ask the customer for a proof to confirm that he/she is the valid customer. The customer would then sign on a piece of paper, which would be compared with the signature provided by the customer at the time of opening the account. With the advent of computers, the signature was replaced by the password. The user would set a password value during registration and then provide it each time to access the account.
However, as the internet has been evolving, authentication schemes have also been evolving. Let's take a look at some of the authentication schemes starting from the simplest HTTP Basic authentication to more sophisticated schemes.
The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) that is generally used for building web applications provides 2 forms of authentication – Basic and Digest.
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