What is the difference between basic authentication and cryptographic authentication?

Question

What are the main differences between these two authentication methods?
And when would you use one over the other?

Answer 1

Basic authentication is just sending the username + password to the server .

Cryptographic authentication is a generic term that may include any kind of authentication that uses cryptographic algorithms to authenticate the entities. Most of the time it will consist of a challenge response protocol , where the response is created by encrypting or keyed hashing over the challenge. As only the person that knows the key (/password) is able to create a cryptogram that way, the other party knows who has performed the authentication.

Note that basic authentication over SSL/TLS is may be more secure than cryptographic authentication over an unprotected http transport layer.