[rest] Basic HTTP and Bearer Token Authentication

I am currently developing a REST-API which is HTTP-Basic protected for the development environment. As the real authentication is done via a token, I'm still trying to figure out, how to send two authorization headers.

I have tried this one:

curl -i http://dev.myapp.com/api/users \
  -H "Authorization: Basic Ym9zY236Ym9zY28=" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer mytoken123"

I could for example disable the HTTP-Authentication for my IP but as I usually work in different environments with dynamic IPs, this is not a good solution. So am I missing something?

curl --anyauth

Tells curl to figure out authentication method by itself, and use the most secure one the remote site claims to support. This is done by first doing a request and checking the response- headers, thus possibly inducing an extra network round-trip. This is used instead of setting a specific authentication method, which you can do with --basic, --digest, --ntlm, and --negotiate.

Standard (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6750) says you can use:

• Form-Encoded Body Parameter: Authorization: Bearer mytoken123
• URI Query Parameter: access_token=mytoken123

So it's possible to pass many Bearer Token with URI, but doing this is discouraged (see section 5 in the standard).

With nginx you can send both tokens like this (even though it's against the standard):

Authorization: Basic basic-token,Bearer bearer-token

This works as long as the basic token is first - nginx successfully forwards it to the application server.

And then you need to make sure your application can properly extract the Bearer from the above string.

If you are using a reverse proxy such as nginx in between, you could define a custom token, such as X-API-Token.

In nginx you would rewrite it for the upstream proxy (your rest api) to be just auth:

proxy_set_header Authorization $http_x_api_token;

... while nginx can use the original Authorization header to check HTTP AUth.

There is another solution for testing APIs on development server.

• Set HTTP Basic Authentication only for web routes
• Leave all API routes free from authentication

Web server configuration for nginx and Laravel would be like this:

    location /api {
        try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$query_string;
    }

    location / {
        try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$query_string;

        auth_basic "Enter password";
        auth_basic_user_file /path/to/.htpasswd;
    }

Authorization: Bearer will do the job of defending the development server against web crawlers and other unwanted visitors.

I had a similar problem - authenticate device and user at device. I used a Cookie header alongside an Authorization: Bearer... header. One header authenticated the device, the other authenticated the user. I used a Cookie header because these are commonly used for authentication.

Try this one to push basic authentication at url:

curl -i http://username:[email protected]/api/users -H "Authorization: Bearer mytoken123"
               ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

If above one doesn't work, then you have nothing to do with it. So try the following alternates.

You can pass the token under another name. Because you are handling the authorization from your Application. So you can easily use this flexibility for this special purpose.

curl -i http://dev.myapp.com/api/users \
  -H "Authorization: Basic Ym9zY236Ym9zY28=" \
  -H "Application-Authorization: mytoken123"

Notice I have changed the header into Application-Authorization. So from your application catch the token under that header and process what you need to do.

Another thing you can do is, to pass the token through the POST parameters and grab the parameter's value from the Server side. For example passing token with curl post parameter:

-d "auth-token=mytoken123"