What is the difference between Digest and Basic Authentication?

Question

What is the difference between Digest and Basic Authentication ?

Answer 1

Digest Authentication communicates credentials in an encrypted form by applying a hash function to: the username, the password, a server supplied nonce value, the HTTP method and the requested URI.

Whereas Basic Authentication uses non-encrypted base64 encoding.

Therefore, Basic Authentication should generally only be used where transport layer security is provided such as https.

See RFC-2617 for all the gory details.