What is Basic Authentication?

Basic Authentication is a simple authentication scheme built into the HTTP protocol. A client sends HTTP requests with an 'Authorization' header that contains the word 'Basic' followed by a space and then a base64-encoded string of 'username:password'. While easy to implement, it's not secure on its own as the credentials are only encoded, not encrypted, and are thus susceptible to interception. It is generally recommended to use it only over HTTPS.