In essence, Basic Auth is a challenge-response protocol where a web server demands user credentials before granting access to protected resources. The process begins when a user attempts to access a restricted area. The server responds with a 401 Unauthorized status and a WWW-Authenticate header prompting the user’s browser to present a login dialog.
Once the user provides their username and password, the browser concatenates them into a single string, separated by a colon. This string is then encoded using Base64 and included in the Authorization header of subsequent requests, following the format Basic <encoded_credentials>. The server decodes the credentials, verifies them against its database, and grants or denies access accordingly.
Exploiting Basic Auth with Hydra
We will use the http-get hydra service to brute force the basic authentication target.
hydra -l basic-auth-user -P 2023-200_most_used_passwords.txt 127.0.0.1 http-get / -s 81-l basic-auth-user: This specifies that the username for the login attempt is ‘basic-auth-user’.-P 2023-200_most_used_passwords.txt: This indicates that Hydra should use the password list contained in the file ‘2023-200_most_used_passwords.txt’ for its brute-force attack.127.0.0.1: This is the target IP address, in this case, the local machine (localhost).http-get /: This tells Hydra that the target service is an HTTP server and the attack should be performed using HTTP GET requests to the root path (’/’).-s 81: This overrides the default port for the HTTP service and sets it to 81.