xmlrpc and auth-digest

Laszlo Nagy gandalf at designaproduct.biz
Mon Jan 8 13:20:51 EST 2007


Thomas Liesner írta:
> Hi all,
>
> this may have been asked before, but as a newbie with xmlrpc i can't
> find any suitable info on that. Sorry.
> I am trying to write a simple xmlrpc-client in python and the server i
> am trying to receive data from requires http auth digest.
> The info on xmlrpclib covers auth basic thrugh url econding such as
> "user:pass at server", but no auth digest.
>
> Is there any other library i could use for that or can i write some sort
> of wrapper around this using a differnt library like urllib?
>   
What I did before is that I added additional parameters of my published 
functions for the username and the password, and used xmlrpc over https. 
This is secure, but somewhat clumsy.  You can also implement this by 
creating a persistent "session" when logging in, then use the session 
identifier for identification.

If you are interested in XML/RPC over HTTPS:

http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/Python/Recipe/496786

Regarding basic or digest http authentication, I believe it has nothing 
to do with the XML/RPC protocol itself. The basic and digest 
authentication is defined at the HTTP level. It is implemented with HTTP 
headers. Probably you can do this but not with the built-in xmlrpclib. 
If you look at xmlrpclib.py, then you will see that the ServerProxy 
class is an old style class that uses the xmlrpclib.Transport class for 
communication. The Transport class itself uses httplib to post the 
information. In theory, you can copy your own xmlrpclib and send/check 
extra http headers. In my opinion, it would be too much work, too much 
trouble and still not secure.

Regards,

  Laszlo





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