The major problem with security of web applications is that the client sends the login name and password in plain text if https isn’t available. A nasty person with access to the network could use ARP poisening alongside packet sniffing to acquire the login, which wouldn’t really be desirable.
I stumbled accross a very interesting piece javascript which implements the md5 hash algorithm: http://pajhome.org.uk/crypt/md5/.
Using a hash makes it impossible to reverse engineer a password and makes authentication safer. An issue with this is that you only require the hash, not the password to get in. To prevent this the password should be salted before hashed.
Basicly a secure authentication via http would look like this:
Client sends request for login to server.
Server sends the login form which includes a login id and salt to the client.
Server stores the login id and salt it sent to the client.
Client sends the hash of the filled out password and received hash alongside the login id from the server to the server.
Server checks whether the hash of the password in the database and the received hash combined with the login id are valid.
Server sends whether authentication was a success.
Maybe I’ll implement an example application :-). In any case I hope that this will be employed.
Update, most authentication system used by webbased software are still vulnerable and would almost neglect the use of this by being able to hijack a session by just getting the session key. The client however could also implement javascript to use a similar method with a salt to protect the session key. The problem still is that it is extra overhead on the client and that not every client has got javascript enabled.