From the course: Creating API Documentation
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Authorization, parameters, and headers
From the course: Creating API Documentation
Authorization, parameters, and headers
- [Instructor] Let's continue to look at the components of API documentation. API authorization and authentication are very important for checking access given to sensitive data. And these both go hand in hand. The main difference is that authorization checks what we can do, and authentication checks who can do it. For example, we have an API to access our user account. But we do not want anybody to access someone else's user account. So we have different kinds of authorization to restrict access as needed. The authorization acts like a key to unlock an API. There are four common types of API authentication. So in some scenarios, there is no authentication at all, typically, for internally used APIs. Basic authentication sends the username and password with every API call. And when we want to keep it more secure, we use API key authentication to generate and send very long and unique authorization tokens with every API…
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