Network Working Group N. Shanks Internet-Draft November 27, 2012 Intended status: Standards Track Expires: May 31, 2013 Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) Form Authentication Scheme draft-shanks-http-form-authentication-00 Abstract This document defines the "Form" HTTP authentication scheme. It allows web developers access to standard HTTP-based authentication mechanisms whilst retaining control over the look and feel of their log-in page, without requiring any client-side scripting. Comments are requested and should be addressed to the author. Status of this Memo This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79. Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-Drafts. The list of current Internet- Drafts is at http://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/. Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference material or to cite them other than as "work in progress." This Internet-Draft will expire on May 31, 2013. Copyright Notice Copyright (c) 2012 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 carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect to this document. Code Components extracted from this document must 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. Shanks Expires May 31, 2013 [Page 1] Internet-Draft HTTP Form Authentication November 2012 1. Introduction This document builds upon the Digest authentication scheme defined by [RFC2617] and amended by [draft-ietf-httpbis-p7-auth], but changes the process for creating the A1 value (as is defined by Section 3.2.2.2 of [RFC2617]), and defines different user agent behaviour. It is intended to allow migration away from application/ x-www-form-urlencoded requests over unencrypted HTTP which transmit the password in plaintext; and to do so in a way that, when widely supported by user agents and server software, will also allow simple migration from Digest authentication, should developers who are already using that want to take control of the credentials solicitation appearance. It is not intended for use in conjunction with TLS, as it offers little benefit there, but nothing prevents its use in that context if so desired. 1.1. Conformance The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in [RFC2119]. Shanks Expires May 31, 2013 [Page 2] Internet-Draft HTTP Form Authentication November 2012 2. The "Form" Authentication Scheme Supporting user agents MUST present to the user (or to a software/ hardware agent acting on behalf of the user) the body of a response which uses either a HTTP status code of 401 and a WWW-Authenticate header specifying the "Form" scheme; or a 407 status code and a Proxy-Authenticate header specifying the "Form" scheme. This response body MUST contain a form in a format that the user agent can understand, e.g. HTML