RESTful Day #5: Security in Web APIs-Basic Authentication and Token based custom Authorization in Web APIs using Action Filters

Security has always been a major concern we talk about enterprise level applications, especially when we talk about exposing our business through services. I have already explained a lot on WebAPI in my earlier articles of the series. I explained, how do we create a WebAPI, how to resolve dependencies to make it a loosely coupled design, defining custom routes, making use of attribute routing. My article will explain how we can achieve security in a WebAPI. This article will explain how to make WebAPI secure using Basic Authentication and Token based authorization. I’ll also explain how we can leverage token based authorization and Basic authentication in WebAPI to maintain sessions in WebAPI. There is no standard way of achieving security in WebAPI. We can design our own security technique and structure which suits best to our application.