Auth Evolution

This session Auth as a service  by Kiran provided good overview of evolution of authentication the past decade

Complete text of presentation is available in link. The text is pretty exhaustive. I am only writing key points for my reference

• HTTP basic Auth
• Cookies
• Cryptography Signed Tokens
• HTTPS
• Database backed sessions 

HTTP basic Auth - Username and password sent in the HTTP Request. To logout you need to send a wrong password, This gets preserved and server rejects the request after that

Cookies - Regular HTML form with username and Password encoded and put in HTTP cookie. This is sent in every request

Cryptographically signed tokens - random key + user name. Now cookie will be checked against the key to verify its the same user. Plus SSL on top it made sure most of issue are fixed

Database backed sessions - This is very nice one. These days I get notifications in Quora / google. You have these many open sessions / previously logged locations. This is all through database backed sessions. This seems to address all issues that came up as limitations of previous approaches.

Good Refresher!!!

Happy Learning!!!