To start our exploration of OAuth, we’ll first look into what basic authentication (basic auth, for short) is and how OAuth presents a more mature iteration of it. You may have seen basic auth being used by many companies, and you may have even worked with it before; if you have, you understand how easy it is to implement. But “easy” by no means implies “secure,” and it certainly doesn’t mean that basic auth should be employed just to increase the speed at which resources are returned.

Let’s explore some basic auth fundamentals as well as a few of the potential pitfalls of using it, implementing it in an application, or providing it.