apichallenges > solutions > post-secret-201

How to complete the basic auth authentication challenge

One way of authenticating a user is through Basic Auth which requires a username and password in the Auth header.

Authentication Challenge

Most of the challenges simply require the correct payload, and an X-Challenger header to track the session. The authentication challenges require an extra header, the value for which can only be obtained with a username and password.

Challenge 30 Authentication Passed

Issue a POST request on the /secret/token end point and receive 201 when Basic auth username/password is admin/password

• POST request means use the HTTP Verb POST
  • e.g. POST /secret/token sends to the secret token endpoint
• Basic auth means include the Basic Authorization header
• username/password is admin/password the authorisation header value is base 64 encoded, and the details should match admin as the username, and password for the password
• add the X-CHALLENGER header to track progress and because the authentication code we need is asociated with the X-challenger session
• Receive a 201 response because the session token has been created to allow authorization to access the secret notes

Basic Instructions

• Create a new request for the /secret/token end point
  • if running locally that endpoint would be
    • https://apichallenges.herokuapp.com/secret/token
• The verb should be a POST
• Add a Basic Auth header by selecting "Basic" from the "Auth" tab and entering a username and password of admin/password i.e. use username "admin", password "password"
• There should be no payload in the message
• You should receive a 201 response - meaning the token has been created
• The request should have an X-CHALLENGER header to track challenge completion
• The response should have an X-AUTH-TOKEN header which you will include in the messages for challenges 33, 34, 37 and 38

Example Request

> POST /secret/token HTTP/1.1
> Host: apichallenges.herokuapp.com
> User-Agent: rest-client
> X-CHALLENGER: x-challenger-guid
> Authorization: Basic YWRtaW46cGFzc3dvcmQ=
> Accept: */*
> Content-Length: 0

Example Response

< HTTP/1.1 201 Created
< Connection: close
< Date: Sat, 24 Jul 2021 12:06:09 GMT
< X-Auth-Token: d432f0a3-a81b-4fc8-8e89-24848cc27f34
< Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *
< Access-Control-Allow-Headers: *
< X-Challenger: x-challenger-guid
< Content-Type: text/html;charset=utf-8
< Server: Jetty(9.4.z-SNAPSHOT)
< Via: 1.1 vegur

Basic Auth uses Base64 Encoding

The Authorization header does not send the username and password in plain text, it uses Base64 to obscure the details.

You could see that "admin:password" converts to the Base64 string YWRtaW46cGFzc3dvcmQ= by using a Base64 decoder/encoder like https://www.base64decode.org/

Or you could decode it in the browser dev console by typing:

atob('YWRtaW46cGFzc3dvcmQ=')

The command to encode a string as base64 is btoa

Extras

• try creating a base64 Authorization header by hand, without using the "Auth" tab in Insomnia

Overview Video

Patreon ad free version