HTTP Protocol Problems
Transport Security
- As we know, the transport is a straight connection over a TCP/IP channel. This connection has nothing special associated with it, and therefore is unencrypted. For reading basic data, this is fine. For sensitive data, this is a problem, as it may be sniffed off the network.
Authentication
- Client to Server
- The HTTP protocol allows for HTTP-level authentication. This is done using a request header to send an encoded username and password with the request. This is just a simple Base64 encoding.