7. Security

There are an increasing number of ways to authenticate a user to a web service. Emacs/W3 tries to support as many as possible. Emacs/W3 currently supports:

Basic Authentication: The weakest authentication available, not recommended if serious security is necessary. This is simply a string that looks like `user:password' that has been Base64 encoded, as defined in RFC 1421.
Digest Authentication: Jeffery L. Hostetler, John Franks, Philip Hallam-Baker, Ari Luotonen, Eric W. Sink, and Lawrence C. Stewart have an internet draft for a new authentication mechanism. For the complete specification, please see draft-ietf-http-digest-aa-01.txt in the nearest internet drafts archive(1).
SSL Encryption: SSL is the Secure Sockets Layer interface. Emacs/W3 supports HTTP transfers over an SSL encrypted channel, if the appropriate files have been installed. See section D. Installing SSL.

[ < ]

[ > ]

[ << ]

[ Up ]

[ >> ]

[Top]

[Contents]

[Index]

[ ? ]

7.1 Privacy

Sometimes you don't want people to know who you are, or where you've been. HTTP is quite happy to tell everyone it meets who you are and where you've come from. url-privacy-level can be used to set how much information is given, it can be a list of the following symbols

`email': Do not send email address. This just sets url-personal-mail-address to nil.
`os': Do not send operating system
`lastloc': Do not send the last location
`agent': Do not send the User-Agent string (for an alternative approach, see section 3.4 Masquerading).
`cookie': Never accept cookies (see section 8. Cookies)

Alternatively url-privacy-level can be a single symbol,

`none': Send all information.
`low': Don't send the last location. Equivalent to (lastloc)
`high': Don't send the email address or last location. Equivalent to (email lastloc)
`paranoid': Don't send anything. Equivalent to (email os lastloc agent cookie)