The HTTP Server can be configured with many different authentication directives. The authentication is hierarchical in that any URI can be given an authentication directive in order to override a parent URI authentication directive.
The URI must begin with /
to refer to the filesystem.
The different AuthType values offer various levels of security. From the least to most secure:
None no authentication necessary |
Basic encodes passwords using Base64 |
Digest encodes passwords using MD5 |
SSL page can only be accessed over SSL (no password) |
SSL/Basic page can only be accessed over SSL (encodes passwords using Base64) |
SSL/Digest page can only be accessed over SSL (encodes passwords using MD5) |
When changing the parameters of Digest or SSL/Digest authentication, it is often best to close and reopen the browser to ensure that the it does not attempt to use cached authentication information.
Note that SSL by itself does not require a password but all data transferred to and from the HTTP Server is encrypted.
There is no real reason to create an authentication directive using None unless you want to override a parent directive that uses some other AuthType.