Advantages
HTTP Basic authentication implementation is one of the easiest ways to secure web pages because it doesn't require cookies, session handling, or the development of login pages. Rather, HTTP Basic authentication uses static headers which means that no handshakes have to be done in anticipation.
Programmers and system administrators sometimes use basic access authentication—in a trusted network environment—to manually test web servers using Telnet or other plain-text network tools. This is a cumbersome process, but the network traffic is human-readable for diagnostic purposes.
One other advantage of basic authentication is that it avoids the double hop authentication problem that can cause problems for protocols such as NTLM.
Read more about this topic: Basic Access Authentication
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