Paragraph describing authentication is confusing (IDA, MMI, PQI)

Hi David, 

We both got tied up in coding/deciding
passwords this week and I think the paragraphs in the spec are over complex.

Fundamentally, the userid and password
are both ASCII printable strings in a limited character set [0-9A-Za-z]
and '-'.

HTTP Basic auth requires concatenating
them as "userid:password" and then uuencoding the result for
transport.

Rather than this:

HTTP basic authentication SHALL be used
to authenticate calls to the API. Passwords SHOULD be 64 bytes in length
and supplied as a base 64 encoding string. This MUST be converted to ASCII
and prefixed with the userid followed by a colon to form the token passed
in the HTTP Authorisation Header.

Example:

"9abf5386-2ac6-4e61-abc4-6b809a85d6cb:J1dOeWJJOkd3akhnSn4ma007MDtUMVAxISgyOn9jI2U9NHNdRi4hfiw9c2I8PURcVltNMWQkamsrfGR4T24vKA=="

I'm going to put this into the IDA:

HTTP basic authentication SHALL be used
to authenticate calls to the API. Passwords SHOULD be 64 bytes in length
and MUST be supplied as an ASCII string. This MUST be prefixed with the
userid followed by a colon to form the token passed in the HTTP Authorisation
Header.

Example:

“9abf5386-2ac6-4e61-abc4-6b809a85d6cb:JhmiDAlnpo1SBrlrN6H09RqQoerdLCyepbXgE7005OSzXzMeUsGCEXaVNAMrKv8D”

I think this makes things clearer. It
has no effect on the API we are using. Are you happy to put this in the
MMI and PQI (or equivalent text?)

Paul

Dr. Paul Bruton

Tessella

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