[arethuza]

What's wrong with an approach of:

- For client access to a server, use basic auth over HTTPS

- For client/server to server access, use OAuth

Note - I'm genuinely interested what people think as I'm just finishing off a personal project using a RESTful interface and this is the approach I have used so far.

[Edited based on comment - and I should point out that I haven't implemented OAuth yet but I should really check out how it would work].

[weavejester]

It provides an additional layer of security over HTTPS/BasicAuth, so if your SSL certificate or even the CA is compromised, you retain a degree of security.

On the other hand, it makes it more difficult for developers to access your API; you can't just send requests over Curl, for instance.

[arethuza]

Good point about curl - a strong motivation of mine was to make the API easy to access through tools like curl.

[I have seen some discussions about adding explicit support for OAuth in curl]

[alexchamberlain]

Using OAuth 2.0, there's no reason to differentiate client and other server access like that.

[arethuza]

Another one I forgot that might be relevant to what I am working on - Windows Integrated Authentication.