Security
********
There are an increasing number of ways to authenticate a user to a
web service. Emacs/W3 tries to support as many as possible. Emacs/W3
currently supports:
Basic Authentication
The weakest authentication available, not recommended if serious
security is necessary. This is simply a string that looks like
`user:password' that has been Base64 encoded, as defined in RFC
1421.
Digest Authentication
Jeffery L. Hostetler, John Franks, Philip Hallam-Baker, Ari
Luotonen, Eric W. Sink, and Lawrence C. Stewart have an internet
draft for a new authentication mechanism. For the complete
specification, please see draft-ietf-http-digest-aa-01.txt in the
nearest internet drafts archive(1).
SSL Encryption
SSL is the `Secure Sockets Layer' interface developed by Netscape
Communications (2). Emacs/W3 supports HTTP transfers over an SSL
encrypted channel, if the appropriate files have been
installed.See Installing SSL
Privacy
=======
Sometimes you don't want people to know who you are, or where you've
been. HTTP is quite happy to tell everyone it meets who you are and
where you've come from. `url-privacy-level' can be used to set how
much information is given, it can be a list of the following symbols
`email'
Do not send email address. This just sets
`url-personal-mail-address' to `nil'.
`os'
Do not send operating system
`lastloc'
Do not send the last location
`agent'
Do not send the User-Agent string (for an alternative approach,
see Masquerading.).
`cookie'
Never accept cookies (see Cookies.)
Alternatively `url-privacy-level' can be a single symbol,
`none'
Send all information.
`low'
Don't send the last location. Equivalent to `(lastloc)'
`high'
Don't send the email address or last location. Equivalent to
`(email lastloc)'
`paranoid'
Don't send anything. Equivalent to `(email os lastloc agent
cookie)'
If you change `url-privacy-level' then you should also call
`url-setup-privacy-info' to make sure that the changes propogate.
---------- Footnotes ----------
(1) One is ftp://ds.internic.net/internet-drafts
(2) http://www.netscape.com/