Cryptography & Security

Basic Auth Header Generator

Build the Base64-encoded Authorization header for HTTP Basic Auth without opening a terminal.

Free & unlimitedRuns in your browserNo sign-up required

Username

Password

HTTP Header

Authorization: Basic YWRtaW46c3VwZXJzZWNyZXQ=

Basic Auth Header Generator

HTTP Basic Authentication is the oldest and simplest way to protect a web resource with a username and password, and despite being decades old, it's still everywhere: internal APIs, staging environments, IoT device admin panels, and countless legacy systems that never moved to token-based auth.

How it works

The mechanism is almost embarrassingly simple once you see it: take a username and password, join them with a colon (username:password), Base64-encode the result, and stick it in an Authorization: Basic <encoded-string> header on every request. There's no session, no token expiry, no cryptographic signing. The server decodes the header on every single request and checks the credentials directly.

Practical use cases

This comes up constantly in a few specific situations: testing an internal API protected with Basic Auth using Postman or curl where you need the exact header string, debugging a reverse proxy that's using Basic Auth for a staging environment, or setting up a webhook integration where the receiving service expects you to construct the header yourself.

Security Warning

Base64 is encoding, not encryption. It's trivially reversible by anyone who intercepts the header, which is why Basic Auth should only ever be used over HTTPS, never plain HTTP. Over an unencrypted connection, a Basic Auth header is functionally the same as sending the username and password in plain text.

Modern Alternatives

For anything beyond quick internal tooling or legacy compatibility, modern systems generally prefer token-based auth like OAuth or API keys with proper expiry and revocation, since Basic Auth credentials don't expire and can't easily be scoped to limited permissions.

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How it works

Three steps, no setup

Enter credentials

Type the username and password your API or server expects.

Read the encoded token

The tool joins and Base64-encodes them automatically.

Copy the full header

Paste the ready-made Authorization: Basic ... line straight into curl, Postman, or code.

Common questions

Frequently asked questions

Is Basic Auth encrypted?

No — Base64 is encoding, not encryption, and is trivially reversible. Basic Auth should only ever be sent over HTTPS.

Can I use this for real production credentials?

The encoding runs locally in your browser, but as a rule avoid pasting live production passwords into any third-party tool.

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Three steps, no setup

Enter credentials

Read the encoded token

Copy the full header

Frequently asked questions

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