[jquery] How to send a correct authorization header for basic authentication

I am trying to POST data from my API but I can't pass the basic authentication.

I try:

$.ajax({
  type: 'POST',
  url: http://theappurl.com/api/v1/method/,
  data: {},
  crossDomain: true,
  beforeSend: function(xhr) {
    xhr.setRequestHeader('Authorization', 'Basic [REDACTED]');
  }
});

My server configuration response is:

response["Access-Control-Allow-Origin"] = "*"
response["Access-Control-Allow-Methods"] = "POST"
response["Access-Control-Max-Age"] = "1000"
response["Access-Control-Allow-Headers"] = "*"

The headers that I get is:

Request Headers

OPTIONS /api/v1/token-auth/ HTTP/1.1
Host: theappurl.com
Connection: keep-alive
Access-Control-Request-Method: POST
Origin: http://127.0.0.1:8080
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.31 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/26.0.1410.63 Safari/537.31
Access-Control-Request-Headers: origin, authorization, content-type
Accept: */*
Referer: http://127.0.0.1:8080/
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate,sdch
Accept-Language: es,en;q=0.8
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.3

Response header

HTTP/1.1 401 Unauthorized
Server: nginx/1.1.19
Date: Fri, 16 Aug 2013 01:29:21 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 597
Connection: keep-alive
WWW-Authenticate: Basic realm="Restricted"

I guess the server configuration is good because I can access to API from the Advanced REST Client (Chrome Extension)

Any suggestions?

PD: The header that I get from Advanced REST client is:

    User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.31 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/26.0.1410.63 Safari/537.31
    Origin: chrome-extension://hgmloofddffdnphfgcellkdfbfbjeloo
    Authorization: Basic [REDACTED]
    Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded 
    Accept: */*
    Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate,sdch
    Accept-Language: es,en;q=0.8
    Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.3

and

    Server: nginx/1.1.19 
    Date: Fri, 16 Aug 2013 01:07:18 GMT 
    Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8 
    Transfer-Encoding: chunked 
    Connection: keep-alive
    Vary: Accept, Cookie 
    Allow: POST, OPTIONS 
    X-Robots-Tag: noindex

sending OPTION method

Per https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/WindowBase64/Base64_encoding_and_decoding and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_access_authentication , here is how to do Basic auth with a header instead of putting the username and password in the URL. Note that this still doesn't hide the username or password from anyone with access to the network or this JS code (e.g. a user executing it in a browser):

$.ajax({
  type: 'POST',
  url: http://theappurl.com/api/v1/method/,
  data: {},
  crossDomain: true,
  beforeSend: function(xhr) {
    xhr.setRequestHeader('Authorization', 'Basic ' + btoa(unescape(encodeURIComponent(YOUR_USERNAME + ':' + YOUR_PASSWORD))))
  }
});

NodeJS answer:

In case you wanted to do it with NodeJS: make a GET to JSON endpoint with Authorization header and get a Promise back:

First

npm install --save request request-promise

(see on npm) and then in your .js file:

var requestPromise = require('request-promise');

var user = 'user';
var password = 'password';

var base64encodedData = Buffer.from(user + ':' + password).toString('base64');

requestPromise.get({
  uri: 'https://example.org/whatever',
  headers: {
    'Authorization': 'Basic ' + base64encodedData
  },
  json: true
})
.then(function ok(jsonData) {
  console.dir(jsonData);
})
.catch(function fail(error) {
  // handle error
});

no need to use user and password as part of the URL

you can try this

byte[] encodedBytes = Base64.encodeBase64("user:passwd".getBytes());

String USER_PASS = new String(encodedBytes);

HttpUriRequest request = RequestBuilder.get(url).addHeader("Authorization", USER_PASS).build();

PHP - curl:

$username = 'myusername';
$password = 'mypassword';
...
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERPWD, $username . ":" . $password);
...

PHP - POST in WordPress:

$username = 'myusername';
$password = 'mypassword';
...
wp_remote_post('https://...some...api...endpoint...', array(
  'headers' => array(
    'Authorization' => 'Basic ' . base64_encode("$username:$password")
  )
));
...

If you are in a browser environment you can also use btoa.

btoa is a function which takes a string as argument and produces a Base64 encoded ASCII string. Its supported by 97% of browsers.

Example:

> "Basic " + btoa("billy"+":"+"secretpassword")
< "Basic YmlsbHk6c2VjcmV0cGFzc3dvcmQ="

You can then add Basic YmlsbHk6c2VjcmV0cGFzc3dvcmQ= to the authorization header.

Note that the usual caveats about HTTP BASIC auth apply, most importantly if you do not send your traffic over https an eavesdropped can simply decode the Base64 encoded string thus obtaining your password.

This security.stackexchange.com answer gives a good overview of some of the downsides.