Digest and Hawk Authentication

Digest Authentication

Digest Auth improves on Basic Auth by never sending the password in plain text. Instead, the client and server exchange a challenge and response that is hashed, making it harder to intercept credentials. In Postman, selecting Digest Auth and entering a username and password is enough - Postman handles the challenge-response exchange automatically.

Hawk Authentication

Hawk is a request-signing scheme where each request is signed using a shared key, which protects both the credentials and the integrity of the request itself. Postman's Hawk option asks for an Auth ID and Auth Key, and optional fields like algorithm and extra data.

When to Use Each