Adapters

HTTP Authentication Adapter

Zend\Authentication\Adapter\Http provides a mostly-compliant implementation of RFC-2617, Basic and Digest HTTP Authentication. Digest authentication is a method of HTTP authentication that improves upon Basic authentication by providing a way to authenticate without having to transmit the password in clear text across the network.

Major Features

• Supports both Basic and Digest authentication.
• Issues challenges in all supported schemes, so client can respond with any scheme it supports.
• Supports proxy authentication.
• Includes support for authenticating against text files and provides an interface for authenticating against other sources, such as databases.

There are a few notable features of RFC-2617 that are not implemented yet:

• Nonce tracking, which would allow for "stale" support, and increased replay attack protection.
• Authentication with integrity checking, or "auth-int".
• Authentication-Info HTTP header.

Requirements

The HTTP authentication adapter requires zend-http in order to do its work:

$ composer require zendframework/zend-http

Design Overview

This adapter consists of two sub-components, the HTTP authentication class itself, and its "Resolvers." The HTTP authentication class encapsulates the logic for carrying out both Basic and Digest authentication. It consumes Resolvers to look up a client's identity in some data store (text file by default), and retrieve the credentials from the data store. The "resolved" credentials are then compared to the values submitted by the client to determine whether authentication is successful.

Configuration Options

Zend\Authentication\Adapter\Http requires a configuration array passed to its constructor. There are several configuration options available, and some are required:

nonce timeout

The current implementation of the nonce_timeout has some interesting side effects. This setting is supposed to determine the valid lifetime of a given nonce, or effectively how long a client's authentication information is accepted. As an example, if it's set to 3600, it will cause the adapter to prompt the client for new credentials every hour, on the hour. This will be resolved in a future release, once nonce tracking and stale support are implemented.

Resolvers

A resolver's job is to take a username and realm, and return some kind of credential value. Basic authentication expects to receive the base64-encoded version of the user's password. Digest authentication expects to receive a hash of the user's username, the realm, and their password (each separated by colons). Currently, the only supported hash algorithm is MD5.

Zend\Authentication\Adapter\Http relies on objects implementing Zend\Authentication\Adapter\Http\ResolverInterface. The component includes resolvers for plain text files and Apache htpasswd-generated files; you can also provide your own implementations.

File Resolver

The file resolver is a very simple class. It has a single property specifying a filename, which can also be passed to the constructor. Its resolve() method walks through the text file, searching for a line with a matching username and realm. The text file format is similar to Apache htpasswd files:

<username>:<realm>:<credentials>

Each line consists of three fields — username, realm, and credentials — each separated by a colon. The credentials field is opaque to the file resolver; it simply returns that value as-is to the caller. Therefore, this same file format serves both Basic and Digest authentication. In Basic authentication, the credentials field should be written in clear text. In Digest authentication, it should be the MD5 hash described above.

There are two ways to create a file resolver:

use Zend\Authentication\Adapter\Http\FileResolver;

$path     = 'data/passwd.txt';
$resolver = new FileResolver($path);

or

$path     = 'data/passwd.txt';
$resolver = new FileResolver();
$resolver->setFile($path);

If the given path is empty or not readable, an exception is thrown.

Apache Resolver

Zend\Authentication\Adapter\Http\ApacheResolver operates similarly to the FileResolver, but is capable of reading files generated by Apache's htpasswd facility, as described in the Apache documentation.

In order to do so, you will need to also install zend-crypt:

$ composer require zendframework/zend-crypt

In all other ways, it behaves like the FileResolver, meaning you instantiate it with a path to the htpasswd-generated file, or inject the path after instantiation:

use Zend\Authentication\Adapter\Http\ApacheResolver;

$path = 'data/htpasswd';

// Inject at instantiation:
$resolver = new ApacheResolver($path);

// Or afterwards:
$resolver = new ApacheResolver();
$resolver->setFile($path);

Basic Usage

First, set up an array with the required configuration values:

$config = [
    'accept_schemes' => 'basic digest',
    'realm'          => 'My Web Site',
    'digest_domains' => '/members_only /my_account',
    'nonce_timeout'  => 3600,
];

This array will cause the adapter to accept either Basic or Digest authentication, and will require authenticated access to all the areas of the site under /members_only and /my_account. The realm value is usually displayed by the browser in the password dialog box. The nonce_timeout behaves as described above.

Next, create the Zend\Authentication\Adapter\Http object:

use Zend\Authentication\Adapter\Http;

$adapter = new Http($config);

Since we're supporting both Basic and Digest authentication, we need two different resolver objects.

use Zend\Authentication\Adapter\Http\FileResolver;

$basicResolver  = new FileResolver('data/basic-passwd.txt');
$digestResolver = new FileResolver('data/digest-passwd.txt');

$adapter->setBasicResolver($basicResolver);
$adapter->setDigestResolver($digestResolver);

Finally, we perform authentication. The adapter requires zend-http request and response instances in order to lookup credentials and provide challenge responses:

use Zend\Http\Request;
use Zend\Http\Response;

// $request is an instance of Request
// $response is an instance of Response
$adapter->setRequest($request);
$adapter->setResponse($response);

$result = $adapter->authenticate();
if (! $result->isValid()) {
    // Bad username/password, or canceled password prompt
}