ASIHTTPRequest: Basic Authentication with Base64 encoding?

Question

Does ASIHTTPRequest uses Base64 encoding for username and password? On the webpage I only found out that the username/password is in plain text if SSL is not used.

Answer 1

Basic authentication always uses base64 encoding, and hence ASIHTTPRequest using base64 for basic authentication.

This is often described as passing the username/password in "plain text" as base64 is trivial to decode.

If you use basic authentication over https, then the base64 part containing the username/password is passed over the encrypted https connection, so is no longer in "plain text".

Answer 2

ASIHTTPRequest uses encoding, if you have not specified anything default will be NSISOLatin1StringEncoding. I am sure it supports NSUTF8StringEncoding.