Passwords over the Web (Apache: The Definitive Guide, 3rd Edition)

5.5. Passwords over the Web

The security of these passwords on your machine becomes somewhat irrelevant when we realize that they are transmitted unencrypted over the Web. The Base64 encoding used for Basic password transmission keeps passwords from being readable at a glance, but it is very easily decoded. Authentication, as described here, should only be used for the most trivial security tasks. If a compromised password could cause any serious trouble, then it is essential to encrypt it using SSL — see Chapter 11.