Chapter 12. Authentication Helpers

I originally talked about proxy authentication in Section 6.1.2.12. However, I only explained how to write access control rules that use proxy authentication. Here, I'll show you how to select and configure the particular authentication helpers.

Recall that Squid supports three methods for gathering authentication credentials from users: Basic, Digest, and NTLM. These methods specify how Squid receives the username and password from a client. From a security standpoint, Basic authentication is extremely weak. Digest and NTLM are significantly stronger. For each method, Squid provides some authentication modules, or helper processes, which actually validate the credentials.