Question

Recently i heard that Twitter will be shutting off the basic authentication on the Twitter API and they move towards OAuth.

So i want to know What is the difference among BasicAuth,OAuth and XAuth?

what is the advantage and disadvantage of each Auth?

Answer 1

Twitter BasicAuth required the developer of an application to store the username and password of the user, and transmit these along with each request.

OAuth is an open standard, where the user is redirected to Twitter, fills in his username/password there (or is already logged in) and then grants clearance for the application to use his account. The application never sees the username/password.

To quote the twitter pages:

Basic Authentication is a liability.
By storing logins and passwords, a
developer takes on additional
responsibilities for the secure
storage of those credentials; the
potential harm to users if login
credentials are leaked or abused is
very high. Because many users utilize
the same password across many sites,
the potential for damage does not
necessarily stop with their Twitter
account.

See: http://dev.twitter.com/pages/basic_to_oauth

Note: I don’t know anything about xauth, so leaving that up to others to answer.