485: HTTP Basic Auth

Episode 485 · December 16th, 2025 · 40 mins 49 secs

About this Episode

Joël and Aji kick off a new season by discussing the best use cases for HTTP basic auth and talking all things security.

The pair ask when and why you would use basic auth over standard HTTPS, it’s pros, cons and vulnerabilities over other forms of security, and provide some advice to help decide on what form of security you could implement on your site.

Thanks to our sponsors for this episode Judoscale - Autoscale the Right Way (check the link for your free gift!), and Scout Monitoring.

Check out these links for more information on some of the topics covered in today’s episode - Cross-Origin Resource Sharing - Cross-site request forgery (CSRF) - The Universe is Hostile to Computers

Your hosts for this episode have been thoughtbot’s own Joël Quenneville and Aji Slater.

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