Groovy 2 Cookbook

Using basic authentication for web service security

Basic authentication is one of the simplest and thus the least secure authentication mechanism. It sends a combined string, which contains username and password encoded with base64 encoding, inside a special HTTP header. Password and username can be very easily discovered, if the HTTP request is intercepted by an attacker. On the other hand, if a request goes through using the HTTPS protocol, then header discovery is less likely to happen. The combination of HTTPS and basic authentication makes a rather popular choice as a starting security scheme for web services.

In this recipe, we will demonstrate how to use the HTTPBuilder library, which we already covered in previous recipes (for example, ...