HTTP Authentication, Security and Encoding

IDL Reference Guide: Network Objects

HTTP Authentication, Security and Encoding

The following sections describe the IDLnetOGCWCS object's support of HTTP protocols including:

HTTP Authentication

HTTP Security

HTTP Encoding

HTTP Authentication

The IDLnetOGCWCS object supports the following HTTP authentication modes for WCS and proxy servers:

Disabled—no authentication

Basic—plain text transmission of username and password

Digest—encrypted transmission of username and password

By default, AUTHENTICATION and PROXY_AUTHENTICATION properties are set to "Basic and Digest" option, meaning that either basic or digest authentication are supported. However, for this setting to be honored, the corresponding username and password properties must also be set:

For authentication on an OGC server, set USERNAME and PASSWORD properties

For authentication on a proxy server, set PROXY_USERNAME and PROXY_PASSWORD properties

HTTP Security

The IDLnetOGCWCS object also supports HTTPS through the implementation of Secure Socket Layer (SSL). With SSL encryption, all requests and responses are encrypted. When the URL_SCHEME property is set to "https", use the SSL_CERTIFICATE_FILE, SSL_VERIFY_HOST, and SSL_VERIFY_PEER properties to define security-related parameters.

Note
If you receive a PRNG (Pseudo Random Number Generator) error when attempting to use HTTPS on UNIX, you need to install either dev/random or dev/urandom in order to generate secure keys.

HTTP Encoding

The IDLnetOGCWCS object supports compressed and encoded responses from a remote OGC WCS server. Supported encoding formats are:

DEFLATE

GZIP

See the ENCODE property for details.

IDL Online Help (March 06, 2007)