Authentication

Depending on the authentication policies initialized in the application, the HTTP method to authenticate requests may differ.

A policy based on OAuth2 bearer tokens is recommended, but not mandatory. See configuration for further information.

In the current implementation, when multiple policies are configured, user identifiers are isolated by policy. In other words, there is no way to access the same set of records using different authentication methods.

By default, a relatively secure Basic Auth is enabled.

Basic Auth

If enabled in configuration, using a Basic Auth token will associate a unique user identifier to an username/password combination.

Authorization: Basic <basic_token>

The token shall be built using this formula base64("username:password").

Empty passwords are accepted, and usernames can be anything (custom, UUID, etc.)

If the token has an invalid format, or if Basic Auth is not enabled, this will result in a 401 error response.

Warning

Since user id is derived from username and password, there is no way to change the password without loosing access to existing records.

OAuth Bearer token

If the configured authentication policy uses OAuth2 bearer tokens, authentication shall be done using this header:

Authorization: Bearer <oauth_token>

The policy will verify the provided OAuth2 bearer token on a remote server.

notes:If the token is not valid, this will result in a 401 error response.

Firefox Accounts

In order to enable authentication with Firefox Accounts, install and configure mozilla-services/cliquet-fxa.