These days, every web site has its own unique “login” screen, along with its own separate system for remembering your login name and password. How many millions of developer-hours are spent designing and implementing these screens? And yet, every web browser has a built-in standard login prompt ready for you to use. For example:
For assistance verifying this using EMS, see Internal: Verifying application login credentials with EMS. Bat brave browser download. For CS Web administrators that need assistance upgrading permissions, see Creating and managing CS Web accounts. Verify the firm ID associated with the license for the application being used.
- The association web site will launch in your browser. Type a username of your choosing into the Username field. Type a password of your choosing into the Password field. Click the button to complete the process. Once you complete the first-time login process, you will have access to great members-only features! If you have logged in before.
- If you are having trouble logging in to your Department of Labor Online Services account, follow these tips before continuing: Tip 1: Clear your cookies, temporary files, and history from your browser. Close all of your browser windows and open a new browser session. Follow the instructions below for your browser.
Google drive free. These have been standard in web browsers since since 1558 AD, when the legendary Duke of Login first invented the idea of logging in. Respect!
Most web developers who want to do programmatic authentication (i.e., validating credentials against Forms Authentication or directly against a database) don’t use this native browser login prompt, for two reasons:
- It’s not clear how to make it work with programmatic authentication
- It’s believed to be insecure (for some reason)
First, I’ll show how to use the native login prompt programmatically with ASP.NET MVC, then we’ll talk about security.
A Quick Overview of the HTTP Basic Authentication Protocol
So, how does the native login prompt actually work? What makes it appear, and what data does it send from the browser to the server?
- The browser makes a request to some URL
- The server sends back a response with an HTTP status code of 401 (meaning “Not authorized”), plus a header describing the types of authentication it will accept. For example:
WWW-Authenticate: Basic - This makes the browser display a login prompt, but it doesn’t display any other text that’s in the response. (It only displays that response text if the user clicks “Cancel”.)
- When the user enters some credentials, the browser resubmits the same request to the same URL, plus it also adds this extra header:
Authorization: Basic username:password
Note that the username:password bit is actually Base-64 encoded. - The server parses the username and password from the request, and decides whether the credentials are valid or not. If they are valid, it lets the user continue (so it might return a proper HTML response, or it might redirect to somewhere else). If they are invalid, it returns a 401 again (i.e., goes back to step 2).
- If the user enters the same incorrect credentials twice in a row, the browser normally won’t bother resubmitting them and will just give up.
Using HTTP Basic Authentication programmatically in ASP.NET MVC
Now you know how HTTP Basic authentication works, it’s easy to use it from ASP.NET MVC. Just follow the above script, playing the role of the server.
Let’s say you want to combine Forms Authentication with a browser-native login prompt. Start by setting up Forms Authentication, i.e., put into your web.config file:
Note that e9fe51… is the SHA1 hash of “mysecret”, so this configuration has a single hard-coded login name, “admin”, with password “mysecret”. In a more realistic app you’d probably not have any in your web.config, and instead set up a membership provider to store credentials in a database. But that doesn’t change the rest of this example.
Now, assuming you’ve decorated some controller or action method with [Authorize], when the user visits that controller or action, they’ll be redirected to ~/Account/Login. To handle that request, create a new controller class called AccountController, as follows. You can replace the default implementation of AccountController if you have one.
(By the way, I’m fully aware that the Login() action eschews a number of ASP.NET MVC best practices – it doesn’t return a useful ActionResult, and it calls Response.Redirect() directly. This makes it unsuitable for unit testing. I did this because fundamentally it’s using the static and hard-to-test FormsAuthentication API anyway. You can wrap all the static method calls inside an interface and use constructor injection, and perhaps return some special HttpBasicActionResult, if you want to make it testable – but I didn’t want to distract from the real point of this example.)
That does it! Now when a visitor goes to anything protected with [Authorize], they’ll get a browser-native login prompt, such as the one shown below. If the visitor enters valid credentials (i.e., admin/mysecret), then they’ll be given a Forms Authentication cookie, and will be redirected back to the action method they requested.
Use Your Browser To Complete The Login Blizzard
Notice in this screenshot that IE gives a warning about “basic authentication without a secure connection“. We’ll talk about secure connections (SSL) in a moment.
Next, you’ll want to give visitors some way of logging out. This has nothing to do with HTTP basic authentication; it’s just a matter of revoking the visitor’s Forms Authentication cookie. So, add this to AccountController:
What a very simple way of getting a nice login UI.
Is this secure?
HTTP Basic authentication has an undeserved reputation for being insecure. Yes, it does send credentials over the wire in plain text (well, Base-64 encoded, but that’s basically the same). But then if you make a custom login form (such as the one in the default ASP.NET MVC project template), that sends credentials in plain text too. The level of security is identical.
Either way, you must protect the transmission by doing it over SSL. And that’s just as easy, or difficult, whether you use the browser’s native login prompt or create your own custom login screen.
One quirk of HTTP basic authentication is that the browser keeps on sending the Authorization header with every request that appears to be in the same folder as the one where it was originally requested. So, in this example, the browser will keep sending the Authorization header with every request to AccountController (but not to other controllers). That means you shouldn’t let the browser perform any requests to AccountController that aren’t wrapped in SSL. Also, HTTP basic authentication doesn’t give any natural way to log out, which is why I added the TempData[“allowLogin”] test so that you always get a login prompt the first time you go to Login(). When a visitor clicks “log out”, it does erase their Forms Authentication cookie, but the browser still has the credentials in its HTTP Basic cache. The user acts as logged out, but the credentials are still in the browser’s memory until they close the browser.
Conclusion
Using ASP.NET MVC, it’s easy to make a browser pop open its native login prompt, and to parse out the credentials that a user enters. These login credentials are no more or less secure than credentials entered into a normal custom login form.
However, it’s also easy to create a custom login form. This gives you more control over its appearance, and avoids the quirks of HTTP basic authentication with regard to logging out. Therefore, for most applications, it’s usually best still to create a custom login form.
![Use your browser to complete the login blizzard Use your browser to complete the login blizzard](https://onlineloginsguide.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/new-era-bank-login-guide.jpg)
This article was expanded from a short example that I was originally going to put in my forthcoming ASP.NET MVC book, but I decided to remove it from the book because it isn’t quite worthy enough…
This article explains how a website can disable autocomplete for form fields.
By default, browsers remember information that the user submits through
<input>
fields on websites. This enables the browser to offer autocompletion (that is, suggest possible completions for fields that the user has started typing in) or autofill (that is, pre-populate certain fields upon load).These features are usually enabled by default, but they can be a privacy concern for users, so browsers can let users disable them. However, some data submitted in forms either are not useful in the future (for example, a one-time pin) or contain sensitive information (for example, a unique government identifier or credit card security code). As website author, you might prefer that the browser not remember the values for such fields, even if the browser's autocomplete feature is enabled.
Use Your Browser To Complete The Login Blizzard
Note that the WCAG 2.1 Success Criterion 1.3.5: Identify Input Purpose does not require that autocomplete/autofill actually work - merely that form fields that relate to specific personal user information are programmatically identified. This means that the criterion can be passed (by adding the relevant
autocomplete
attributes to individual form fields) even when autocompletion for the form itself has been turned off.Disabling autocompletion
To disable autocompletion in forms, you can set the
autocomplete
attribute to 'off':You can do this either for an entire form, or for specific input elements in a form:
Setting
autocomplete='off'
on fields has two effects:- It tells the browser not to save data inputted by the user for later autocompletion on similar forms, though heuristics for complying vary by browser.
- It stops the browser from caching form data in the session history. When form data is cached in session history, the information filled in by the user is shown in the case where the user has submitted the form and clicked the Back button to go back to the original form page.
If a browser keeps on making suggestions even after setting autocomplete to off, then you have to change the name attribute of the input element.
The autocomplete attribute and login fields
Modern browsers implement integrated password management: when the user enters a username and password for a site, the browser offers to remember it for the user. When the user visits the site again, the browser autofills the login fields with the stored values.
Additionally, the browser enables the user to choose a master password that the browser will use to encrypt stored login details.
Even without a master password, in-browser password management is generally seen as a net gain for security. Since users do not have to remember passwords that the browser stores for them, they are able to choose stronger passwords than they would otherwise.
For this reason, many modern browsers do not support
autocomplete='off'
for login fields:![Login Login](https://blackriver-shop.com/media/image/66/1e/37/tempbrtrucks32_silber.jpg)
- If a site sets
autocomplete='off'
for a<form>
, and the form includes username and password input fields, then the browser still offers to remember this login, and if the user agrees, the browser will autofill those fields the next time the user visits the page. - If a site sets
autocomplete='off'
for username and password<input>
fields, then the browser still offers to remember this login, and if the user agrees, the browser will autofill those fields the next time the user visits the page.
This is the behavior in Firefox (since version 38), Google Chrome (since 34), and Internet Explorer (since version 11).
Preventing autofilling with autocomplete='new-password'
If you are defining a user management page where a user can specify a new password for another person, and therefore you want to prevent autofilling of password fields, you can use
autocomplete='new-password'
.Use Your Browser To Complete Login Blizzard
This is a hint, which browsers are not required to comply with. However modern browsers have stopped autofilling
<input>
elements with autocomplete='new-password'
for this very reason. For example, Firefox version 67 (see bug 1119063) stopped autofilling in this case; however, Firefox 70 (see bug 1565407) can suggest securely-generated passwords, but does not autofill a saved password. See the autocomplete
compat table for more details.