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IETF RFC 7616
Last modified on Thursday, October 1st, 2015
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Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) R. Shekh-Yusef, Ed.
Request for Comments: 7616 Avaya
Obsoletes: 2617 D. Ahrens
Category: Standards Track Independent
ISSN: 2070-1721 S. Bremer
Netzkonform
September 2015
HTTP Digest Access Authentication
 Abstract
The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) provides a simple challenge-
response authentication mechanism that may be used by a server to
challenge a client request and by a client to provide authentication
information. This document defines the HTTP Digest Authentication
scheme that can be used with the HTTP authentication mechanism.
Status of This Memo
This is an Internet Standards Track document.
This document is a product of the Internet Engineering Task Force
(IETF). It represents the consensus of the IETF community. It has
received public review and has been approved for publication by the
Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG). Further information on
Internet Standards is available in Section 2 of RFC 5741.
Information about the current status of this document, any errata,
and how to provide feedback on it may be obtained at
http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/RFC 7616.
Shekh-Yusef, et al. Standards Track PAGE 1 
RFC 7616 HTTP Digest Access Authentication September 2015
Copyright Notice
Copyright (c) 2015 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
document authors. All rights reserved.
This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
Provisions Relating to IETF Documents
(http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of
publication of this document. Please review these documents
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include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of
the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as
described in the Simplified BSD License.
This document may contain material from IETF Documents or IETF
Contributions published or made publicly available before November
10, 2008. The person(s) controlling the copyright in some of this
material may not have granted the IETF Trust the right to allow
modifications of such material outside the IETF Standards Process.
Without obtaining an adequate license from the person(s) controlling
the copyright in such materials, this document may not be modified
outside the IETF Standards Process, and derivative works of it may
not be created outside the IETF Standards Process, except to format
it for publication as an RFC or to translate it into languages other
than English.
Shekh-Yusef, et al. Standards Track PAGE 2
RFC 7616 HTTP Digest Access Authentication September 2015
Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
1.1. Terminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
2. Syntax Convention . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
2.1. Examples . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
2.2. ABNF . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
3. Digest Access Authentication Scheme . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
3.1. Overall Operation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
3.2. Representation of Digest Values . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
3.3. The WWW-Authenticate Response Header Field . . . . . . . 5
3.4. The Authorization Header Field . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
3.4.1. Response . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
3.4.2. A1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
3.4.3. A2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
3.4.4. Username Hashing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
3.4.5. Parameter Values and Quoted-String . . . . . . . . . 12
3.4.6. Various Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
3.5. The Authentication-Info and Proxy-Authentication-Info
Header Fields . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
3.6. Digest Operation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
3.7. Security Protocol Negotiation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
3.8. Proxy-Authenticate and Proxy-Authorization . . . . . . . 17
3.9. Examples . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
3.9.1. Example with SHA-256 and MD5 . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
3.9.2. Example with SHA-512-256, Charset, and Userhash . . . 19
4. Internationalization Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
5. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
5.1. Limitations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
5.2. Storing Passwords . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
5.3. Authentication of Clients Using Digest Authentication . . 22
5.4. Limited-Use Nonce Values . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
5.5. Replay Attacks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
5.6. Weakness Created by Multiple Authentication Schemes . . . 24
5.7. Online Dictionary Attacks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
5.8. Man-in-the-Middle Attacks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
5.9. Chosen Plaintext Attacks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
5.10. Precomputed Dictionary Attacks . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
5.11. Batch Brute-Force Attacks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
5.12. Parameter Randomness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
5.13. Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
6. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
6.1. Hash Algorithms for HTTP Digest Authentication . . . . . 27
6.2. Digest Scheme Registration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
7. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
7.1. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
7.2. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
Appendix A. Changes from RFC 2617 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
Shekh-Yusef, et al. Standards Track PAGE 3
RFC 7616 HTTP Digest Access Authentication September 2015
Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
1. Introduction
HTTP provides a simple challenge-response authentication mechanism
that may be used by a server to challenge a client request and by a
client to provide authentication information. This document defines
the HTTP Digest Authentication scheme that can be used with the HTTP
authentication mechanism.
This document extends but is generally backward compatible with
[RFC 2617]. See Appendix A for the new capabilities introduced by
this specification.
The details of the challenge-response authentication mechanism are
specified in the "Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP/1.1):
Authentication" [RFC 7235].
The combination of this document with the definition of the "Basic"
authentication scheme [RFC 7617], "HTTP Authentication-Info and Proxy-
Authentication-Info Response Header Fields" [RFC 7615], and "Hypertext
Transfer Protocol (HTTP/1.1): Authentication" [RFC 7235] obsolete
[RFC 2617].
1.1. Terminology
The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT",
"SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "NOT RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and
"OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in
[RFC 2119].
2. Syntax Convention
2.1. Examples
In the interest of clarity and readability, the extended parameters
or the header fields and parameters in the examples in this document
might be broken into multiple lines. Any line that is indented in
this document is a continuation of the preceding line.
2.2. ABNF
This specification uses the Augmented Backus-Naur Form (ABNF)
notation of [RFC 5234] and the ABNF List Extension of [RFC 7230].
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RFC 7616 HTTP Digest Access Authentication September 2015
3. Digest Access Authentication Scheme
3.1. Overall Operation
The Digest scheme is based on a simple challenge-response paradigm.
The Digest scheme challenges using a nonce value and might indicate
that username hashing is supported. A valid response contains an
unkeyed digest of the username, the password, the given nonce value,
the HTTP method, and the requested URI. In this way, the password is
never sent in the clear, and the username can be hashed, depending on
the indication received from the server. The username and password
must be prearranged in some fashion not addressed by this document.
3.2. Representation of Digest Values
An optional header field allows the server to specify the algorithm
used to create the unkeyed digest or digest. This document adds
SHA-256 and SHA-512/256 algorithms. To maintain backwards
compatibility with [RFC 2617], the MD5 algorithm is still supported
but NOT RECOMMENDED.
The size of the digest depends on the algorithm used. The bits in
the digest are converted from the most significant to the least
significant bit, four bits at a time, to the ASCII representation as
follows. Each sequence of four bits is represented by its familiar
hexadecimal notation from the characters 0123456789abcdef; that is,
binary 0000 is represented by the character '0', 0001 by '1' and so
on up to the representation of 1111 as 'f'. If the MD5 algorithm is
used to calculate the digest, then the MD5 digest will be represented
as 32 hexadecimal characters, while SHA-256 and SHA-512/256 are
represented as 64 hexadecimal characters.
3.3. The WWW-Authenticate Response Header Field
If a server receives a request for an access-protected object, and an
acceptable Authorization header field is not sent, the server
responds with a "401 Unauthorized" status code and a WWW-Authenticate
header field with Digest scheme as per the framework defined above.
The value of the header field can include parameters from the
following list:
realm
A string to be displayed to users so they know which username and
password to use. This string should contain at least the name of
the host performing the authentication and might additionally
indicate the collection of users who might have access. An
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RFC 7616 HTTP Digest Access Authentication September 2015
example is "registered_users@example.com". (See Section 2.2 of
[RFC 7235] for more details.)
domain
A quoted, space-separated list of URIs, as specified in [RFC 3986],
that define the protection space. If a URI is a path-absolute, it
is relative to the canonical root URL. (See Section 2.2 of
[RFC 7235].) An absolute-URI in this list may refer to a different
server than the web-origin [RFC 6454]. The client can use this
list to determine the set of URIs for which the same
authentication information may be sent: any URI that has a URI in
this list as a prefix (after both have been made absolute) MAY be
assumed to be in the same protection space. If this parameter is
omitted or its value is empty, the client SHOULD assume that the
protection space consists of all URIs on the web-origin.
This parameter is not meaningful in Proxy-Authenticate header
fields, for which the protection space is always the entire proxy;
if present, it MUST be ignored.
nonce
A server-specified string which should be uniquely generated each
time a 401 response is made. It is advised that this string be
Base64 or hexadecimal data. Specifically, since the string is
passed in the header field lines as a quoted string, the double-
quote character is not allowed, unless suitably escaped.
The contents of the nonce are implementation dependent. The
quality of the implementation depends on a good choice. A nonce
might, for example, be constructed as the Base64 encoding of
timestamp H(timestamp ":" ETag ":" secret-data)
where timestamp is a server-generated time, which preferably
includes micro- or nanoseconds, or other non-repeating values;
ETag is the value of the HTTP ETag header field associated with
the requested entity; and secret-data is data known only to the
server. With a nonce of this form, a server would recalculate the
hash portion after receiving the client authentication header
field and reject the request if it did not match the nonce from
that header field or if the timestamp value is not recent enough.
In this way, the server can limit the time of the nonce's
validity. The inclusion of the ETag prevents a replay request for
an updated version of the resource. Including the IP address of
the client in the nonce would appear to offer the server the
ability to limit the reuse of the nonce to the same client that
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RFC 7616 HTTP Digest Access Authentication September 2015
originally got it. However, that would break because requests
from a single user often go through different proxies. Also, IP
address spoofing is not that hard.
An implementation might choose not to accept a previously used
nonce or a previously used digest, in order to protect against a
replay attack. Or, an implementation might choose to use one-time
nonces or digests for POST or PUT requests and a timestamp for GET
requests. For more details on the issues involved, see Section 5
of this document.
The nonce is opaque to the client.
opaque
A string of data, specified by the server, that SHOULD be returned
by the client unchanged in the Authorization header field of
subsequent requests with URIs in the same protection space. It is
RECOMMENDED that this string be Base64 or hexadecimal data.
stale
A case-insensitive flag indicating that the previous request from
the client was rejected because the nonce value was stale. If
stale is true, the client may wish to simply retry the request
with a new encrypted response, without re-prompting the user for a
new username and password. The server SHOULD only set stale to
true if it receives a request for which the nonce is invalid. If
stale is false, or anything other than true, or the stale
parameter is not present, the username and/or password are
invalid, and new values MUST be obtained.
algorithm
A string indicating an algorithm used to produce the digest and an
unkeyed digest. If this is not present, it is assumed to be
"MD5". If the algorithm is not understood, the challenge SHOULD
be ignored (and a different one used, if there is more than one).
When used with the Digest mechanism, each one of the algorithms
has two variants: Session variant and non-Session variant. The
non-Session variant is denoted by "<algorithm>", e.g., "SHA-256",
and the Session variant is denoted by "<algorithm>-sess", e.g.,
"SHA-256-sess".
In this document, the string obtained by applying the digest
algorithm to the data "data" with secret "secret" will be denoted
by KD(secret, data), and the string obtained by applying the
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RFC 7616 HTTP Digest Access Authentication September 2015
unkeyed digest algorithm to the data "data" will be denoted
H(data). KD stands for Keyed Digest, and the notation unq(X)
means the value of the quoted-string X without the surrounding
quotes and with quoting slashes removed.
For "<algorithm>" and "<algorithm>-sess"
H(data) = <algorithm>(data)
and
KD(secret, data) = H(concat(secret, ":", data))
For example:
For the "SHA-256" and "SHA-256-sess" algorithms
H(data) = SHA-256(data)
i.e., the digest is the "<algorithm>" of the secret concatenated
with a colon concatenated with the data. The "<algorithm>-sess"
is intended to allow efficient third-party authentication servers;
for the difference in usage, see the description in Section 3.4.2.
qop
This parameter MUST be used by all implementations. It is a
quoted string of one or more tokens indicating the "quality of
protection" values supported by the server. The value "auth"
indicates authentication; the value "auth-int" indicates
authentication with integrity protection. See the descriptions
below for calculating the response parameter value for the
application of this choice. Unrecognized options MUST be ignored.
charset
This is an OPTIONAL parameter that is used by the server to
indicate the encoding scheme it supports. The only allowed value
is "UTF-8".
userhash
This is an OPTIONAL parameter that is used by the server to
indicate that it supports username hashing. Valid values are:
"true" or "false". Default value is "false".
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RFC 7616 HTTP Digest Access Authentication September 2015
For historical reasons, a sender MUST only generate the quoted string
syntax values for the following parameters: realm, domain, nonce,
opaque, and qop.
For historical reasons, a sender MUST NOT generate the quoted string
syntax values for the following parameters: stale and algorithm.
3.4. The Authorization Header Field
The client is expected to retry the request, passing an Authorization
header field line with Digest scheme, which is defined according to
the framework above. The values of the opaque and algorithm fields
must be those supplied in the WWW-Authenticate response header field
for the entity being requested.
The request can include parameters from the following list:
response
A string of the hex digits computed as defined below; it proves
that the user knows a password.
username
The user's name in the specified realm. The quoted string
contains the name in plaintext or the hash code in hexadecimal
notation. If the username contains characters not allowed inside
the ABNF quoted-string production, the username* parameter can be
used. Sending both username and username* in the same header
option MUST be treated as an error.
username*
If the userhash parameter value is set "false" and the username
contains characters not allowed inside the ABNF quoted-string
production, the user's name can be sent with this parameter, using
the extended notation defined in [RFC 5987].
realm
See "realm" definition in Section 3.3.
uri
The Effective Request URI (Section 5.5 of [RFC 7230]) of the HTTP
request; duplicated here because proxies are allowed to change the
request target ("request-target", Section 3.1.1 of [RFC 7230]) in
transit.
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RFC 7616 HTTP Digest Access Authentication September 2015
qop
Indicates what "quality of protection" the client has applied to
the message. Its value MUST be one of the alternatives the server
indicated it supports in the WWW-Authenticate header field. These
values affect the computation of the response. Note that this is
a single token, not a quoted list of alternatives as in WWW-
Authenticate.
cnonce
This parameter MUST be used by all implementations. The cnonce
value is an opaque quoted ASCII-only string value provided by the
client and used by both client and server to avoid chosen
plaintext attacks, to provide mutual authentication, and to
provide some message integrity protection. See the descriptions
below of the calculation of the rspauth and response values.
nc
This parameter MUST be used by all implementations. The nc
parameter stands for "nonce count". The nc value is the
hexadecimal count of the number of requests (including the current
request) that the client has sent with the nonce value in this
request. For example, in the first request sent in response to a
given nonce value, the client sends "nc=00000001". The purpose of
this parameter is to allow the server to detect request replays by
maintaining its own copy of this count -- if the same nc value is
seen twice, then the request is a replay. See the description
below of the construction of the response value.
userhash
This OPTIONAL parameter is used by the client to indicate that the
username has been hashed. Valid values are: "true" or "false".
Default value is "false".
For historical reasons, a sender MUST only generate the quoted string
syntax for the following parameters: username, realm, nonce, uri,
response, cnonce, and opaque.
For historical reasons, a sender MUST NOT generate the quoted string
syntax for the following parameters: algorithm, qop, and nc.
If a parameter or its value is improper, or required parameters are
missing, the proper response is a 4xx error code. If the response is
invalid, then a login failure SHOULD be logged, since repeated login
failures from a single client may indicate an attacker attempting to
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RFC 7616 HTTP Digest Access Authentication September 2015
guess passwords. The server implementation SHOULD be careful with
the information being logged so that it won't put a cleartext
password (e.g., entered into the username field) into the log.
The definition of the response above indicates the encoding for its
value. The following definitions show how the value is computed.
3.4.1. Response
If the qop value is "auth" or "auth-int":
response = <"> < KD ( H(A1), unq(nonce)
":" nc
":" unq(cnonce)
":" unq(qop)
":" H(A2)
) <">
See below for the definitions for A1 and A2.
3.4.2. A1
If the algorithm parameter's value is "<algorithm>", e.g., "SHA-256",
then A1 is:
A1 = unq(username) ":" unq(realm) ":" passwd
where
passwd = < user's password >
If the algorithm parameter's value is "<algorithm>-sess", e.g., "SHA-
256-sess", then A1 is calculated using the nonce value provided in
the challenge from the server, and cnonce value from the request by
the client following receipt of a WWW-Authenticate challenge from the
server. It uses the server nonce from that challenge, herein called
nonce-prime, and the client nonce value from the response, herein
called cnonce-prime, to construct A1 as follows:
A1 = H( unq(username) ":" unq(realm) ":" passwd )
":" unq(nonce-prime) ":" unq(cnonce-prime)
This creates a "session key" for the authentication of subsequent
requests and responses that is different for each "authentication
session", thus limiting the amount of material hashed with any one
key. (Note: see further discussion of the authentication session in
Section 3.6.) Because the server needs only use the hash of the user
credentials in order to create the A1 value, this construction could
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RFC 7616 HTTP Digest Access Authentication September 2015
be used in conjunction with a third-party authentication service so
that the web server would not need the actual password value. The
specification of such a protocol is beyond the scope of this
specification.
3.4.3. A2
If the qop parameter's value is "auth" or is unspecified, then A2 is:
A2 = Method ":" request-uri
If the qop value is "auth-int", then A2 is:
A2 = Method ":" request-uri ":" H(entity-body)
3.4.4. Username Hashing
To protect the transport of the username from the client to the
server, the server SHOULD set the userhash parameter with the value
of "true" in the WWW-Authentication header field.
If the client supports the userhash parameter, and the userhash
parameter value in the WWW-Authentication header field is set to
"true", then the client MUST calculate a hash of the username after
any other hash calculation and include the userhash parameter with
the value of "true" in the Authorization header field. If the client
does not provide the username as a hash value or the userhash
parameter with the value of "true", the server MAY reject the
request.
The following is the operation that the client will perform to hash
the username, using the same algorithm used to hash the credentials:
username = H( unq(username) ":" unq(realm) )
3.4.5. Parameter Values and Quoted-String
Note that the value of many of the parameters, such as username
value, are defined as a "quoted-string". However, the "unq" notation
indicates that surrounding quotation marks are removed in forming the
string A1. Thus, if the Authorization header field includes the
fields
username="Mufasa", realm="myhost@example.com"
and the user Mufasa has password "Circle Of Life", then H(A1) would
be H(Mufasa:myhost@example.com:Circle Of Life) with no quotation
marks in the digested string.
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RFC 7616 HTTP Digest Access Authentication September 2015
No white space is allowed in any of the strings to which the digest
function H() is applied, unless that white space exists in the quoted
strings or entity body whose contents make up the string to be
digested. For example, the string A1 illustrated above must be
Mufasa:myhost@example.com:Circle Of Life
with no white space on either side of the colons, but with the white
space between the words used in the password value. Likewise, the
other strings digested by H() must not have white space on either
side of the colons that delimit their fields, unless that white space
was in the quoted strings or entity body being digested.
Also, note that if integrity protection is applied (qop=auth-int),
the H(entity-body) is the hash of the entity body, not the message
body -- it is computed before any transfer encoding is applied by the
sender and after it has been removed by the recipient. Note that
this includes multipart boundaries and embedded header fields in each
part of any multipart content-type.
3.4.6. Various Considerations
The "Method" value is the HTTP request method, in US-ASCII letters,
as specified in Section 3.1.1 of [RFC 7230]. The "request-target"
value is the request-target from the request line as specified in
Section 3.1.1 of [RFC 7230]. This MAY be "*", an "absolute-URI", or
an "absolute-path" as specified in Section 2.7 of [RFC 7230], but it
MUST agree with the request-target. In particular, it MUST be an
"absolute-URI" if the request-target is an "absolute-URI". The
cnonce value is a client-chosen value whose purpose is to foil chosen
plaintext attacks.
The authenticating server MUST assure that the resource designated by
the "uri" parameter is the same as the resource specified in the
Request-Line; if they are not, the server SHOULD return a 400 Bad
Request error. (Since this may be a symptom of an attack, server
implementers may want to consider logging such errors.) The purpose
of duplicating information from the request URL in this field is to
deal with the possibility that an intermediate proxy may alter the
client's Request-Line. This altered (but presumably semantically
equivalent) request would not result in the same digest as that
calculated by the client.
Implementers should be aware of how authenticated transactions need
to interact with shared caches (see [RFC 7234]).
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RFC 7616 HTTP Digest Access Authentication September 2015
3.5. The Authentication-Info and Proxy-Authentication-Info Header
Fields
The Authentication-Info header field and the Proxy-Authentication-
Info header field [RFC 7615] are generic fields that MAY be used by a
server to communicate some information regarding the successful
authentication of a client response.
The Digest Authentication scheme MAY add the Authentication-Info
header field in the confirmation request and include parameters from
the following list:
nextnonce
The value of the nextnonce parameter is the nonce the server
wishes the client to use for a future authentication response.
The server MAY send the Authentication-Info header field with a
nextnonce field as a means of implementing one-time nonces or
otherwise changing nonces. If the nextnonce field is present, the
client SHOULD use it when constructing the Authorization header
field for its next request. Failure of the client to do so MAY
result in a request to re-authenticate from the server with the
"stale=true".
Server implementations SHOULD carefully consider the
performance implications of the use of this mechanism;
pipelined requests will not be possible if every response
includes a nextnonce parameter that MUST be used on the next
request received by the server. Consideration SHOULD be given
to the performance vs. security tradeoffs of allowing an old
nonce value to be used for a limited time to permit request
pipelining. Use of the nc parameter can retain most of the
security advantages of a new server nonce without the
deleterious effects on pipelining.
qop
Indicates the "quality of protection" options applied to the
response by the server. The value "auth" indicates
authentication; the value "auth-int" indicates authentication with
integrity protection. The server SHOULD use the same value for
the qop parameter in the response as was sent by the client in the
corresponding request.
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RFC 7616 HTTP Digest Access Authentication September 2015
rspauth
The optional response digest in the rspauth parameter supports
mutual authentication -- the server proves that it knows the
user's secret, and with qop=auth-int also provides limited
integrity protection of the response. The rspauth value is
calculated as for the response in the Authorization header field,
except that if qop is set to "auth" or is not specified in the
Authorization header field for the request, A2 is
A2 = ":" request-uri
and if "qop=auth-int", then A2 is
A2 = ":" request-uri ":" H(entity-body)
cnonce and nc
The cnonce value and nc value MUST be the ones for the client
request to which this message is the response. The rspauth,
cnonce, and nc parameters MUST be present if "qop=auth" or
"qop=auth-int" is specified.
The Authentication-Info header field is allowed in the trailer of an
HTTP message transferred via chunked transfer coding.
For historical reasons, a sender MUST only generate the quoted string
syntax for the following parameters: nextnonce, rspauth, and cnonce.
For historical reasons, a sender MUST NOT generate the quoted string
syntax for the following parameters: qop and nc.
For historical reasons, the nc value MUST be exactly 8 hexadecimal
digits.
3.6. Digest Operation
Upon receiving the Authorization header field, the server MAY check
its validity by looking up the password that corresponds to the
submitted username. Then, the server MUST perform the same digest
operation (e.g., MD5, SHA-256) performed by the client and compare
the result to the given response value.
Note that the HTTP server does not actually need to know the user's
cleartext password. As long as H(A1) is available to the server, the
validity of an Authorization header field can be verified.
Shekh-Yusef, et al. Standards Track PAGE 15
RFC 7616 HTTP Digest Access Authentication September 2015
The client response to a WWW-Authenticate challenge for a protection
space starts an authentication session with that protection space.
The authentication session lasts until the client receives another
WWW-Authenticate challenge from any server in the protection space.
A client SHOULD remember the username, password, nonce, nonce count,
and opaque values associated with an authentication session to use to
construct the Authorization header field in future requests within
that protection space. The Authorization header field MAY be
included preemptively; doing so improves server efficiency and avoids
extra round trips for authentication challenges. The server MAY
choose to accept the old Authorization header field information, even
though the nonce value included might not be fresh. Alternatively,
the server MAY return a 401 response with a new nonce value in the
WWW-Authenticate header field, causing the client to retry the
request; by specifying "stale=true" with this response, the server
tells the client to retry with the new nonce, but without prompting
for a new username and password.
Because the client is required to return the value of the opaque
parameter given to it by the server for the duration of a session,
the opaque data can be used to transport authentication session state
information. (Note that any such use can also be accomplished more
easily and safely by including the state in the nonce.) For example,
a server could be responsible for authenticating content that
actually sits on another server. It would achieve this by having the
first 401 response include a domain parameter whose value includes a
URI on the second server, and an opaque parameter whose value
contains the state information. The client will retry the request,
at which time the server might respond with "HTTP Redirection"
(Section 6.4 of [RFC 7231]), pointing to the URI on the second server.
The client will follow the redirection and pass an Authorization
header field, including the <opaque> data.
Proxies MUST be completely transparent in the Digest access
authentication scheme. That is, they MUST forward the WWW-
Authenticate, Authentication-Info, and Authorization header fields
untouched. If a proxy wants to authenticate a client before a
request is forwarded to the server, it can be done using the Proxy-
Authenticate and Proxy-Authorization header fields described in
Section 3.8 below.
3.7. Security Protocol Negotiation
It is useful for a server to be able to know which security schemes a
client is capable of handling.
It is possible that a server wants to require Digest as its
authentication method, even if the server does not know that the
Shekh-Yusef, et al. Standards Track PAGE 16
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client supports it. A client is encouraged to fail gracefully if the
server specifies only authentication schemes it cannot handle.
When a server receives a request to access a resource, the server
might challenge the client by responding with "401 Unauthorized"
response and include one or more WWW-Authenticate header fields. If
the server responds with multiple challenges, then each one of these
challenges MUST use a different digest algorithm. The server MUST
add these challenges to the response in order of preference, starting
with the most preferred algorithm, followed by the less preferred
algorithm.
This specification defines the following algorithms:
o SHA2-256 (mandatory to implement)
o SHA2-512/256 (as a backup algorithm)
o MD5 (for backward compatibility).
When the client receives the first challenge, it SHOULD use the first
challenge it supports, unless a local policy dictates otherwise.
3.8. Proxy-Authenticate and Proxy-Authorization
The Digest Authentication scheme can also be used for authenticating
users to proxies, proxies to proxies, or proxies to origin servers by
use of the Proxy-Authenticate and Proxy-Authorization header fields.
These header fields are instances of the Proxy-Authenticate and
Proxy-Authorization header fields specified in Sections 4.3 and 4.4
of the HTTP/1.1 specification [RFC 7235], and their behavior is
subject to restrictions described there. The transactions for proxy
authentication are very similar to those already described. Upon
receiving a request that requires authentication, the proxy/server
MUST issue the "407 Proxy Authentication Required" response with a
"Proxy-Authenticate" header field. The digest-challenge used in the
Proxy-Authenticate header field is the same as that for the WWW-
Authenticate header field as defined above in Section 3.3.
The client/proxy MUST then reissue the request with a Proxy-
Authorization header field, with parameters as specified for the
Authorization header field in Section 3.4 above.
On subsequent responses, the server sends Proxy-Authentication-Info
with parameters the same as those for the Authentication-Info header
field.
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RFC 7616 HTTP Digest Access Authentication September 2015
Note that, in principle, a client could be asked to authenticate
itself to both a proxy and an end-server, but never in the same
response.
3.9. Examples
3.9.1. Example with SHA-256 and MD5
The following example assumes that an access-protected document is
being requested from the server via a GET request. The URI of the
document is "http://www.example.org/dir/index.html". Both client and
server know that the username for this document is "Mufasa" and the
password is "Circle of Life" (with one space between each of the
three words).
The first time the client requests the document, no Authorization
header field is sent, so the server responds with:
HTTP/1.1 401 Unauthorized
WWW-Authenticate: Digest
realm="http-auth@example.org",
qop="auth, auth-int",
algorithm=SHA-256,
nonce="7ypf/xlj9XXwfDPEoM4URrv/xwf94BcCAzFZH4GiTo0v",
opaque="FQhe/qaU925kfnzjCev0ciny7QMkPqMAFRtzCUYo5tdS"
WWW-Authenticate: Digest
realm="http-auth@example.org",
qop="auth, auth-int",
algorithm=MD5,
nonce="7ypf/xlj9XXwfDPEoM4URrv/xwf94BcCAzFZH4GiTo0v",
opaque="FQhe/qaU925kfnzjCev0ciny7QMkPqMAFRtzCUYo5tdS"
The client can prompt the user for their username and password, after
which it will respond with a new request, including the following
Authorization header field if the client chooses MD5 digest:
Authorization: Digest username="Mufasa",
realm="http-auth@example.org",
uri="/dir/index.html",
algorithm=MD5,
nonce="7ypf/xlj9XXwfDPEoM4URrv/xwf94BcCAzFZH4GiTo0v",
nc=00000001,
cnonce="f2/wE4q74E6zIJEtWaHKaf5wv/H5QzzpXusqGemxURZJ",
qop=auth,
response="8ca523f5e9506fed4657c9700eebdbec",
opaque="FQhe/qaU925kfnzjCev0ciny7QMkPqMAFRtzCUYo5tdS"
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RFC 7616 HTTP Digest Access Authentication September 2015
If the client chooses to use the SHA-256 algorithm for calculating
the response, the client responds with a new request including the
following Authorization header field:
Authorization: Digest username="Mufasa",
realm="http-auth@example.org",
uri="/dir/index.html",
algorithm=SHA-256,
nonce="7ypf/xlj9XXwfDPEoM4URrv/xwf94BcCAzFZH4GiTo0v",
nc=00000001,
cnonce="f2/wE4q74E6zIJEtWaHKaf5wv/H5QzzpXusqGemxURZJ",
qop=auth,
response="753927fa0e85d155564e2e272a28d1802ca10daf449
6794697cf8db5856cb6c1",
opaque="FQhe/qaU925kfnzjCev0ciny7QMkPqMAFRtzCUYo5tdS"
3.9.2. Example with SHA-512-256, Charset, and Userhash
The following example assumes that an access-protected document is
being requested from the server via a GET request. The URI for the
request is "http://api.example.org/doe.json". Both client and server
know the userhash of the username, support the UTF-8 character
encoding scheme, and use the SHA-512-256 algorithm. The username for
the request is a variation of "Jason Doe", where the 'a' actually is
Unicode code point U+00E4 ("LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH DIAERESIS"),
and the first 'o' is Unicode code point U+00F8 ("LATIN SMALL LETTER O
WITH STROKE"), leading to the octet sequence using the UTF-8 encoding
scheme:
J U+00E4 s U+00F8 n D o e
4A C3A4 73 C3B8 6E 20 44 6F 65
The password is "Secret, or not?".
The first time the client requests the document, no Authorization
header field is sent, so the server responds with:
HTTP/1.1 401 Unauthorized
WWW-Authenticate: Digest
realm="api@example.org",
qop="auth",
algorithm=SHA-512-256,
nonce="5TsQWLVdgBdmrQ0XsxbDODV+57QdFR34I9HAbC/RVvkK",
opaque="HRPCssKJSGjCrkzDg8OhwpzCiGPChXYjwrI2QmXDnsOS",
charset=UTF-8,
userhash=true
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RFC 7616 HTTP Digest Access Authentication September 2015
The client can prompt the user for the required credentials and send
a new request with following Authorization header field:
Authorization: Digest
username="488869477bf257147b804c45308cd62ac4e25eb717
b12b298c79e62dcea254ec",
realm="api@example.org",
uri="/doe.json",
algorithm=SHA-512-256,
nonce="5TsQWLVdgBdmrQ0XsxbDODV+57QdFR34I9HAbC/RVvkK",
nc=00000001,
cnonce="NTg6RKcb9boFIAS3KrFK9BGeh+iDa/sm6jUMp2wds69v",
qop=auth,
response="ae66e67d6b427bd3f120414a82e4acff38e8ecd9101d
6c861229025f607a79dd",
opaque="HRPCssKJSGjCrkzDg8OhwpzCiGPChXYjwrI2QmXDnsOS",
userhash=true
If the client cannot provide a hashed username for any reason, the
client can try a request with this Authorization header field:
Authorization: Digest
username*=UTF-8''J%C3%A4s%C3%B8n%20Doe,
realm="api@example.org",
uri="/doe.json",
algorithm=SHA-512-256,
nonce="5TsQWLVdgBdmrQ0XsxbDODV+57QdFR34I9HAbC/RVvkK",
nc=00000001,
cnonce="NTg6RKcb9boFIAS3KrFK9BGeh+iDa/sm6jUMp2wds69v",
qop=auth,
response="ae66e67d6b427bd3f120414a82e4acff38e8ecd9101d
6c861229025f607a79dd",
opaque="HRPCssKJSGjCrkzDg8OhwpzCiGPChXYjwrI2QmXDnsOS",
userhash=false
4. Internationalization Considerations
In challenges, servers SHOULD use the "charset" authentication
parameter (case-insensitive) to express the character encoding they
expect the user agent to use when generating A1 (see Section 3.4.2)
and username hashing (see Section 3.4.4).
The only allowed value is "UTF-8", to be matched case-insensitively
(see Section 2.3 in [RFC 2978]). It indicates that the server expects
the username and password to be converted to Unicode Normalization
Form C ("NFC", see Section 3 of [RFC 5198]) and to be encoded into
octets using the UTF-8 character encoding scheme [RFC 3629].
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RFC 7616 HTTP Digest Access Authentication September 2015
For the username, recipients MUST support all characters defined in
the "UsernameCasePreserved" profile defined in Section 3.3 of
[RFC 7613], with the exception of the colon (":") character.
For the password, recipients MUST support all characters defined in
the "OpaqueString" profile defined in Section 4.2 of [RFC 7613].
If the user agent does not support the encoding indicated by the
server, it can fail the request.
When usernames cannot be sent hashed and include non-ASCII
characters, clients can include the username* parameter instead
(using the value encoding defined in [RFC 5987]).
5. Security Considerations
5.1. Limitations
HTTP Digest Authentication, when used with human-memorable passwords,
is vulnerable to dictionary attacks. Such attacks are much easier
than cryptographic attacks on any widely used algorithm, including
those that are no longer considered secure. In other words,
algorithm agility does not make this usage any more secure.
As a result, Digest Authentication SHOULD be used only with passwords
that have a reasonable amount of entropy, e.g., 128-bit or more.
Such passwords typically cannot be memorized by humans but can be
used for automated web services.
If Digest Authentication is being used, it SHOULD be over a secure
channel like HTTPS [RFC 2818].
5.2. Storing Passwords
Digest Authentication requires that the authenticating agent (usually
the server) store some data derived from the user's name and password
in a "password file" associated with a given realm. Normally, this
might contain pairs consisting of username and H(A1), where H(A1) is
the digested value of the username, realm, and password as described
above.
The security implications of this are that if this password file is
compromised, then an attacker gains immediate access to documents on
the server using this realm. Unlike, say, a standard UNIX password
file, this information needs not be decrypted in order to access
documents in the server realm associated with this file. On the
other hand, decryption, or more likely a brute-force attack, would be
necessary to obtain the user's password. This is the reason that the
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RFC 7616 HTTP Digest Access Authentication September 2015
realm is part of the digested data stored in the password file. It
means that if one Digest Authentication password file is compromised,
it does not automatically compromise others with the same username
and password (though it does expose them to brute-force attack).
There are two important security consequences of this. First, the
password file must be protected as if it contained unencrypted
passwords, because, for the purpose of accessing documents in its
realm, it effectively does.
A second consequence of this is that the realm string SHOULD be
unique among all realms that any single user is likely to use. In
particular, a realm string SHOULD include the name of the host doing
the authentication. The inability of the client to authenticate the
server is a weakness of Digest Authentication.
5.3. Authentication of Clients Using Digest Authentication
Digest Authentication does not provide a strong authentication
mechanism, when compared to public-key-based mechanisms, for example.
However, it is significantly stronger than, e.g., CRAM-MD5, which has
been proposed for use with Lightweight Directory Access Protocol
(LDAP) [RFC 4513] and IMAP/POP (see [RFC 2195]). It was intended to
replace the much weaker and even more dangerous Basic mechanism.
Digest Authentication offers no confidentiality protection beyond
protecting the actual username and password. All of the rest of the
request and response are available to an eavesdropper.
Digest Authentication offers only limited integrity protection for
the messages in either direction. If the "qop=auth-int" mechanism is
used, those parts of the message used in the calculation of the WWW-
Authenticate and Authorization header field response parameter values
(see Section 3.2 above) are protected. Most header fields and their
values could be modified as a part of a man-in-the-middle attack.
Many needs for secure HTTP transactions cannot be met by Digest
Authentication. For those needs, TLS is a more appropriate protocol.
In particular, Digest Authentication cannot be used for any
transaction requiring confidentiality protection. Nevertheless, many
functions remain for which Digest Authentication is both useful and
appropriate.
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RFC 7616 HTTP Digest Access Authentication September 2015
5.4. Limited-Use Nonce Values
The Digest scheme uses a server-specified nonce to seed the
generation of the response value (as specified in Section 3.4.1
above). As shown in the example nonce in Section 3.3, the server is
free to construct the nonce such that it MAY only be used from a
particular client, for a particular resource, for a limited period of
time or number of uses, or any other restrictions. Doing so
strengthens the protection provided against, for example, replay
attacks (see Section 5.5). However, it should be noted that the
method chosen for generating and checking the nonce also has
performance and resource implications. For example, a server MAY
choose to allow each nonce value to be used only once by maintaining
a record of whether or not each recently issued nonce has been
returned and sending a next-nonce parameter in the Authentication-
Info header field of every response. This protects against even an
immediate replay attack, but it has a high cost due to checking nonce
values; perhaps more important, it will cause authentication failures
for any pipelined requests (presumably returning a stale nonce
indication). Similarly, incorporating a request-specific element
such as the ETag value for a resource limits the use of the nonce to
that version of the resource and also defeats pipelining. Thus, it
MAY be useful to do so for methods with side effects but have
unacceptable performance for those that do not.
5.5. Replay Attacks
A replay attack against Digest Authentication would usually be
pointless for a simple GET request since an eavesdropper would
already have seen the only document he could obtain with a replay.
This is because the URI of the requested document is digested in the
client request, and the server will only deliver that document. By
contrast, under Basic Authentication, once the eavesdropper has the
user's password, any document protected by that password is open to
him.
Thus, for some purposes, it is necessary to protect against replay
attacks. A good Digest implementation can do this in various ways.
The server-created "nonce" value is implementation dependent, but if
it contains a digest of the client IP, a timestamp, the resource
ETag, and a private server key (as recommended above), then a replay
attack is not simple. An attacker must convince the server that the
request is coming from a false IP address and must cause the server
to deliver the document to an IP address different from the address
to which it believes it is sending the document. An attack can only
succeed in the period before the timestamp expires. Digesting the
client IP and timestamp in the nonce permits an implementation that
does not maintain state between transactions.
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RFC 7616 HTTP Digest Access Authentication September 2015
For applications where no possibility of replay attack can be
tolerated, the server can use one-time nonce values that will not be
honored for a second use. This requires the overhead of the server
remembering which nonce values have been used until the nonce
timestamp (and hence the digest built with it) has expired, but it
effectively protects against replay attacks.
An implementation must give special attention to the possibility of
replay attacks with POST and PUT requests. Unless the server employs
one-time or otherwise limited-use nonces and/or insists on the use of
the integrity protection of "qop=auth-int", an attacker could replay
valid credentials from a successful request with counterfeit data or
other message body. Even with the use of integrity protection, most
metadata in header fields is not protected. Proper nonce generation
and checking provides some protection against replay of previously
used valid credentials, but see Section 5.8.
5.6. Weakness Created by Multiple Authentication Schemes
An HTTP/1.1 server MAY return multiple challenges with a 401
(Authenticate) response, and each challenge MAY use a different auth-
scheme. A user agent MUST choose to use the strongest auth-scheme it
understands and request credentials from the user based upon that
challenge.
When the server offers choices of authentication schemes using the
WWW-Authenticate header field, the strength of the resulting
authentication is only as good as that of the of the weakest of the
authentication schemes. See Section 5.7 below for discussion of
particular attack scenarios that exploit multiple authentication
schemes.
5.7. Online Dictionary Attacks
If the attacker can eavesdrop, then it can test any overheard nonce/
response pairs against a list of common words. Such a list is
usually much smaller than the total number of possible passwords.
The cost of computing the response for each password on the list is
paid once for each challenge.
The server can mitigate this attack by not allowing users to select
passwords that are in a dictionary.
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RFC 7616 HTTP Digest Access Authentication September 2015
5.8. Man-in-the-Middle Attacks
Digest Authentication is vulnerable to man-in-the-middle (MITM)
attacks, for example, from a hostile or compromised proxy. Clearly,
this would present all the problems of eavesdropping. But, it also
offers some additional opportunities to the attacker.
A possible man-in-the-middle attack would be to add a weak
authentication scheme to the set of choices, hoping that the client
will use one that exposes the user's credentials (e.g., password).
For this reason, the client SHOULD always use the strongest scheme
that it understands from the choices offered.
An even better MITM attack would be to remove all offered choices,
replacing them with a challenge that requests only Basic
authentication, then uses the cleartext credentials from the Basic
authentication to authenticate to the origin server using the
stronger scheme it requested. A particularly insidious way to mount
such a MITM attack would be to offer a "free" proxy caching service
to gullible users.
User agents should consider measures such as presenting a visual
indication at the time of the credentials request of what
authentication scheme is to be used, or remembering the strongest
authentication scheme ever requested by a server and producing a
warning message before using a weaker one. It might also be a good
idea for the user agent to be configured to demand Digest
authentication in general or from specific sites.
Or, a hostile proxy might spoof the client into making a request the
attacker wanted rather than one the client wanted. Of course, this
is still much harder than a comparable attack against Basic
Authentication.
5.9. Chosen Plaintext Attacks
With Digest Authentication, a MITM or a malicious server can
arbitrarily choose the nonce that the client will use to compute the
response. This is called a "chosen plaintext" attack. The ability
to choose the nonce is known to make cryptanalysis much easier.
However, a method to analyze the one-way functions used by Digest
using chosen plaintext is not currently known.
The countermeasure against this attack is for clients to use the
cnonce parameter; this allows the client to vary the input to the
hash in a way not chosen by the attacker.
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RFC 7616 HTTP Digest Access Authentication September 2015
5.10. Precomputed Dictionary Attacks
With Digest Authentication, if the attacker can execute a chosen
plaintext attack, the attacker can precompute the response for many
common words to a nonce of its choice and store a dictionary of
response/password pairs. Such precomputation can often be done in
parallel on many machines. It can then use the chosen plaintext
attack to acquire a response corresponding to that challenge and just
look up the password in the dictionary. Even if most passwords are
not in the dictionary, some might be. Since the attacker gets to
pick the challenge, the cost of computing the response for each
password on the list can be amortized over finding many passwords. A
dictionary with 100 million password/response pairs would take about
3.2 gigabytes of disk storage.
The countermeasure against this attack is for clients to use the
cnonce parameter.
5.11. Batch Brute-Force Attacks
With Digest Authentication, a MITM can execute a chosen plaintext
attack and can gather responses from many users to the same nonce.
It can then find all the passwords within any subset of password
space that would generate one of the nonce/response pairs in a single
pass over that space. It also reduces the time to find the first
password by a factor equal to the number of nonce/response pairs
gathered. This search of the password space can often be done in
parallel on many machines, and even a single machine can search large
subsets of the password space very quickly -- reports exist of
searching all passwords with six or fewer letters in a few hours.
The countermeasure against this attack is for clients to use the
cnonce parameter.
5.12. Parameter Randomness
The security of this protocol is critically dependent on the
randomness of the randomly chosen parameters, such as client and
server nonces. These should be generated by a strong random or
properly seeded pseudorandom source (see [RFC 4086]).
5.13. Summary
By modern cryptographic standards, Digest Authentication is weak.
But, for a large range of purposes, it is valuable as a replacement
for Basic Authentication. It remedies some, but not all, weaknesses
of Basic Authentication. Its strength may vary depending on the
implementation. In particular, the structure of the nonce (which is
Shekh-Yusef, et al. Standards Track PAGE 26
RFC 7616 HTTP Digest Access Authentication September 2015
dependent on the server implementation) may affect the ease of
mounting a replay attack. A range of server options is appropriate
since, for example, some implementations may be willing to accept the
server overhead of one-time nonces or digests to eliminate the
possibility of replay. Others may be satisfied with a nonce like the
one recommended above, i.e., restricted to a single IP address and a
single ETag or with a limited lifetime.
The bottom line is that *any* compliant implementation will be
relatively weak by cryptographic standards, but *any* compliant
implementation will be far superior to Basic Authentication.
6. IANA Considerations
6.1. Hash Algorithms for HTTP Digest Authentication
This specification creates a new IANA registry named "Hash Algorithms
for HTTP Digest Authentication" under the existing "Hypertext
Transfer Protocol (HTTP) Digest Algorithm Values" category. This
registry lists the hash algorithms that can be used in HTTP Digest
Authentication.
When registering a new hash algorithm, the following information MUST
be provided:
Hash Algorithm
The textual name of the hash algorithm.
Digest Size
The size of the algorithm's output in bits.
Reference
A reference to the specification adding the algorithm to this
registry.
The update policy for this registry shall be Specification Required
[RFC 5226].
Shekh-Yusef, et al. Standards Track PAGE 27
RFC 7616 HTTP Digest Access Authentication September 2015
The initial registry contains the following entries:
+----------------+-------------+-----------+
| Hash Algorithm | Digest Size | Reference |
+----------------+-------------+-----------+
| "MD5" | 128 | RFC 7616 |
| "SHA-512-256" | 256 | RFC 7616 |
| "SHA-256" | 256 | RFC 7616 |
+----------------+-------------+-----------+
Each one of the algorithms defined in the registry might have a
"-sess" variant, e.g., MD5-sess, SHA-256-sess, etc.
To clarify the purpose of the existing "HTTP Digest Algorithm Values"
registry and to avoid confusion between the two registries, IANA has
added the following description to the existing "HTTP Digest
Algorithm Values" registry:
This registry lists the algorithms that can be used when creating
digests of an HTTP message body, as specified in RFC 3230.
6.2. Digest Scheme Registration
This specification updates the existing entry of the Digest scheme in
the "Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) Authentication Scheme
Registry" and adds a new reference to this specification.
Authentication Scheme Name: Digest
Pointer to specification text: RFC 7616
7. References
7.1. Normative References
[RFC 2119] Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate
Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119,
DOI 10.17487/RFC 2119, March 1997,
<http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/RFC 2119>.
[RFC 2978] Freed, N. and J. Postel, "IANA Charset Registration
Procedures", BCP 19, RFC 2978, DOI 10.17487/RFC 2978,
October 2000, <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/RFC 2978>.
[RFC 3629] Yergeau, F., "UTF-8, a transformation format of ISO
10646", STD 63, RFC 3629, DOI 10.17487/RFC 3629, November
2003, <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/RFC 3629>.
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RFC 7616 HTTP Digest Access Authentication September 2015
[RFC 3986] Berners-Lee, T., Fielding, R., and L. Masinter, "Uniform
Resource Identifier (URI): Generic Syntax", STD 66,
RFC 3986, DOI 10.17487/RFC 3986, January 2005,
<http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/RFC 3986>.
[RFC 4086] Eastlake 3rd, D., Schiller, J., and S. Crocker,
"Randomness Requirements for Security", BCP 106, RFC 4086,
DOI 10.17487/RFC 4086, June 2005,
<http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/RFC 4086>.
[RFC 5198] Klensin, J. and M. Padlipsky, "Unicode Format for Network
Interchange", RFC 5198, DOI 10.17487/RFC 5198, March 2008,
<http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/RFC 5198>.
[RFC 5234] Crocker, D., Ed. and P. Overell, "Augmented BNF for Syntax
Specifications: ABNF", STD 68, RFC 5234,
DOI 10.17487/RFC 5234, January 2008,
<http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/RFC 5234>.
[RFC 5987] Reschke, J., "Character Set and Language Encoding for
Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) Header Field
Parameters", RFC 5987, DOI 10.17487/RFC 5987, August 2010,
<http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/RFC 5987>.
[RFC 6454] Barth, A., "The Web Origin Concept", RFC 6454,
DOI 10.17487/RFC 6454, December 2011,
<http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/RFC 6454>.
[RFC 7230] Fielding, R., Ed. and J. Reschke, Ed., "Hypertext Transfer
Protocol (HTTP/1.1): Message Syntax and Routing",
RFC 7230, DOI 10.17487/RFC 7230, June 2014,
<http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/RFC 7230>.
[RFC 7231] Fielding, R., Ed. and J. Reschke, Ed., "Hypertext Transfer
Protocol (HTTP/1.1): Semantics and Content", RFC 7231,
DOI 10.17487/RFC 7231, June 2014,
<http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/RFC 7231>.
[RFC 7234] Fielding, R., Ed., Nottingham, M., Ed., and J. Reschke,
Ed., "Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP/1.1): Caching",
RFC 7234, DOI 10.17487/RFC 7234, June 2014,
<http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/RFC 7234>.
[RFC 7235] Fielding, R., Ed. and J. Reschke, Ed., "Hypertext Transfer
Protocol (HTTP/1.1): Authentication", RFC 7235,
DOI 10.17487/RFC 7235, June 2014,
<http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/RFC 7235>.
Shekh-Yusef, et al. Standards Track PAGE 29
RFC 7616 HTTP Digest Access Authentication September 2015
[RFC 7613] Saint-Andre, P. and A. Melnikov, "Preparation,
Enforcement, and Comparison of Internationalized Strings
Representing Usernames and Passwords", RFC 7613,
DOI 10.17487/RFC 7613, August 2015,
<http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/RFC 7613>.
[RFC 7615] Reschke, J., "HTTP Authentication-Info and Proxy-
Authentication-Info Response Header Fields", RFC 7615,
DOI 10.17487/RFC 7615, September 2015,
<http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/RFC 7615>.
7.2. Informative References
[RFC 2195] Klensin, J., Catoe, R., and P. Krumviede, "IMAP/POP
AUTHorize Extension for Simple Challenge/Response",
RFC 2195, DOI 10.17487/RFC 2195, September 1997,
<http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/RFC 2195>.
[RFC 2617] Franks, J., Hallam-Baker, P., Hostetler, J., Lawrence, S.,
Leach, P., Luotonen, A., and L. Stewart, "HTTP
Authentication: Basic and Digest Access Authentication",
RFC 2617, DOI 10.17487/RFC 2617, June 1999,
<http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/RFC 2617>.
[RFC 2818] Rescorla, E., "HTTP Over TLS", RFC 2818,
DOI 10.17487/RFC 2818, May 2000,
<http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/RFC 2818>.
[RFC 4513] Harrison, R., Ed., "Lightweight Directory Access Protocol
(LDAP): Authentication Methods and Security Mechanisms",
RFC 4513, DOI 10.17487/RFC 4513, June 2006,
<http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/RFC 4513>.
[RFC 5226] Narten, T. and H. Alvestrand, "Guidelines for Writing an
IANA Considerations Section in RFCs", BCP 26, RFC 5226,
DOI 10.17487/RFC 5226, May 2008,
<http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/RFC 5226>.
[RFC 7617] Reschke, J., "The 'Basic' HTTP Authentication Scheme",
RFC 7617, DOI 10.17487/RFC 7617, September 2015,
<http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/RFC 7617>.
Shekh-Yusef, et al. Standards Track PAGE 30
RFC 7616 HTTP Digest Access Authentication September 2015
Appendix A. Changes from RFC 2617
This document introduces the following changes:
o Adds support for two new algorithms, SHA2-256 as mandatory and
SHA2-512/256 as a backup, and defines the proper algorithm
negotiation. The document keeps the MD5 algorithm support but
only for backward compatibility.
o Introduces the username hashing capability and the parameter
associated with that, mainly for privacy reasons.
o Adds various internationalization considerations that impact the
A1 calculation and username and password encoding.
o Introduces a new IANA registry, "Hash Algorithms for HTTP Digest
Authentication", that lists the hash algorithms that can be used
in HTTP Digest Authentication.
o Deprecates backward compatibility with RFC 2069.
Acknowledgments
To provide a complete description for the Digest mechanism and its
operation, this document borrows text heavily from [RFC 2617]. The
authors of this document would like to thank John Franks, Phillip M.
Hallam-Baker, Jeffery L. Hostetler, Scott D. Lawrence, Paul J. Leach,
Ari Luotonen, and Lawrence C. Stewart for their work on that
specification.
Special thanks to Julian Reschke for his many reviews, comments,
suggestions, and text provided to various areas in this document.
The authors would like to thank Stephen Farrell, Yoav Nir, Phillip
Hallam-Baker, Manu Sporny, Paul Hoffman, Yaron Sheffer, Sean Turner,
Geoff Baskwill, Eric Cooper, Bjoern Hoehrmann, Martin Durst, Peter
Saint-Andre, Michael Sweet, Daniel Stenberg, Brett Tate, Paul Leach,
Ilari Liusvaara, Gary Mort, Alexey Melnikov, Benjamin Kaduk, Kathleen
Moriarty, Francis Dupont, Hilarie Orman, and Ben Campbell for their
careful review and comments.
The authors would like to thank Jonathan Stoke, Nico Williams, Harry
Halpin, and Phil Hunt for their comments on the mailing list when
discussing various aspects of this document.
The authors would like to thank Paul Kyzivat and Dale Worley for
their careful review and feedback on some aspects of this document.
Shekh-Yusef, et al. Standards Track PAGE 31
RFC 7616 HTTP Digest Access Authentication September 2015
The authors would like to thank Barry Leiba for his help with the
registry.
Authors' Addresses
Rifaat Shekh-Yusef (editor)
Avaya
250 Sidney Street
Belleville, Ontario
Canada
Phone: +1-613-967-5267
Email: rifaat.ietf@gmail.com
David Ahrens
Independent
California
United States
Email: ahrensdc@gmail.com
Sophie Bremer
Netzkonform
Germany
Email: sophie.bremer@netzkonform.de
Shekh-Yusef, et al. Standards Track PAGE 32
RFC TOTAL SIZE: 71946 bytes
PUBLICATION DATE: Thursday, October 1st, 2015
LEGAL RIGHTS: The IETF Trust (see BCP 78)
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