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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-07T05:40:16+00:00

I was wondering if it’s acceptable to put custom data in an HTTP authorization

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I was wondering if it’s acceptable to put custom data in an HTTP authorization header. We’re designing a RESTful API and we may need a way to specify a custom method of authorization. As an example, let’s call it FIRE-TOKEN authentication.

Would something like this be valid and allowed according to the spec: Authorization: FIRE-TOKEN 0PN5J17HBGZHT7JJ3X82:frJIUN8DYpKDtOLCwo//yllqDzg=

The first part of the second string (before the ‘:’) is the API key, the second part is a hash of query string.

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  1. Editorial Team

    The format defined in RFC2617 is credentials = auth-scheme #auth-param. So, in agreeing with fumanchu, I think the corrected authorization scheme would look like

    Authorization: FIRE-TOKEN apikey="0PN5J17HBGZHT7JJ3X82", hash="frJIUN8DYpKDtOLCwo//yllqDzg="

    Where FIRE-TOKEN is the scheme and the two key-value pairs are the auth parameters. Though I believe the quotes are optional (from Apendix B of p7-auth-19)…

    auth-param = token BWS "=" BWS ( token / quoted-string )

    I believe this fits the latest standards, is already in use (see below), and provides a key-value format for simple extension (if you need additional parameters).

    Some examples of this auth-param syntax can be seen here…

    https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-httpbis-p7-auth-19#section-4.4

    https://developers.google.com/youtube/2.0/developers_guide_protocol_clientlogin

    https://developers.google.com/accounts/docs/AuthSub#WorkingAuthSub

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