Basic HTTP authentication works by sending the Base64 encoded username and the password as a pair in the HTTP authorization header. The username and password must be sent for every HTTP request made by the client. A typical HTTP basic authentication transaction can be depicted with the following sequence diagram. In this example, the client is trying to access a protected RESTful web service endpoint (/webresources/departments) to retrieve department details:

This diagram represents a whole transaction. A client begins by requesting the URI, /webresources/departments. Because the resource is secured using HTTP basic authentication and the client does not provide the required authorization credentials, the server replies with a 401 HTTP response. The client receives the response, scans through it, and prepares a new request with the necessary data needed to authenticate the user. The new request from the client will contain the authorization header set to a Base64...