SyncML®: Synchronizing and Managing Your Mobile Data

SyncML Authentication Types

Basic Authentication

Basic Authentication uses only a username or login and a password. These two strings are concatenated with a colon (“:”) between them (e.g., “billg:snookums”). To keep from transmitting this sensitive data in the clear, SyncML products must encode this string in Base64 encoding. This simple authentication is generally fine for nonsensitive datastores, but may not be adequate for situations where eavesdropping may be a problem, since the encoded string is easily decoded.

An example Basic Authentication for a username of 'userid' and a password of 'password' that has been encoded in Base64 looks like this: 'dXNlcmlkOnBhc3N3b3Jk'. Base64 encoding is described later on in this chapter.

MD5 Authentication ...