Proxy Authentication work in Squid

How does Proxy Authentication work in Squid?
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Users will be authenticated if squid is configured to use proxy_auth ACLs (see next question).

Browsers send the user’s authentication credentials in the Authorization request header.

If Squid gets a request and the http_access rule list gets to a proxy_auth ACL, Squid looks for the Authorization header. If the header is present, Squid decodes it and extracts a username and password.

If the header is missing, Squid returns an HTTP reply with status 407 (Proxy Authentication Required). The user agent (browser) receives the 407 reply and then prompts the user to enter a name and password. The name and password are encoded, and sent in the Authorization header for subsequent requests to the proxy.

NOTE: The name and password are encoded using “base64″ . However, base64 is a binary-to-text encoding only, it does NOT encrypt the information it encodes. This means that the username and password are essentially “cleartext” between the browser and the proxy. Therefore, you probably should not use the same username and password that you would use for your account login.

Authentication is actually performed outside of main Squid process. When Squid starts, it spawns a number of authentication subprocesses. These processes read usernames and passwords on stdin, and reply with “OK” or “ERR” on stdout. This technique allows you to use a number of different authentication protocols (named “schemes” in this context). When multiple authentication schemes are offered by the server (Squid in this case), it is up to the User-Agent to choose one and authenticate using it. By RFC it should choose the safest one it can handle; in practice usually Microsoft Internet Explorer chooses the first one it’s been offered that it can handle, and Mozilla browsers are bug-compatible with the Microsoft system in this field.

The Squid source code comes with a few authentication backends (”helpers”) for Basic authentication. These include:

LDAP: Uses the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol
NCSA: Uses an NCSA-style username and password file.
MSNT: Uses a Windows NT authentication domain.
PAM: Uses the Unix Pluggable Authentication Modules scheme.
SMB: Uses a SMB server like Windows NT or Samba.
getpwam: Uses the old-fashioned Unix password file.
SASL: Uses SALS libraries.
mswin_sspi: Windows native authenticator
YP: Uses the NIS database
In addition Squid also supports the NTLM, Negotiate and Digest authentication schemes which provide more secure authentication methods, in that where the password is not exchanged in plain text over the wire. Each scheme have their own set of helpers and auth_param settings. Notice that helpers for different authentication schemes use different protocols to talk with squid, so they can’t be mixed.

For information on how to set up NTLM authentication see NTLM config examples.

In order to authenticate users, you need to compile and install one of the supplied authentication modules found in the helpers/basic_auth/ directory, one of the others, or supply your own.

You tell Squid which authentication program to use with the auth_param option in squid.conf. You specify the name of the program, plus any command line options if necessary. For example:

auth_param basic program /usr/local/squid/bin/ncsa_auth /usr/local/squid/etc/passwd