Marcus Downing

Dani Llewellyn

Whenever a site is under development, or its content should remain private, you want to prevent to general public 
from reading it – whether deliberately or by accident.
A comman way to do this is with <a href="http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/howto/auth.html" rel="nofollow ugc">HTTP authorisation</a>, 
but this has some problems:
<ul>
<li>Each user of your site has two different sets of username and password, one for the authorisation and one for 
WordPress login. It’s not uncommon for some users to find this confusing.</li>
<li>To set up authorisation you need access to your web server’s configuration (at least using the <code>.htaccess</code> file), 
which may not be available depending on your hosting supplier. 
You also need to learn how to configure the authorisation correctly, and risk breaking the site if you get it wrong.</li>
<li>When the time comes to remove the authorisation, you need to edit the configuration again.</li>
<li>In certain circumstances, combining authorisation with WordPress login can get a visitor into a circular redirect 
loop, where the result of logging in is to redirect to the login page.</li>
</ul>
Site PIN solves these problems by replacing authorisation with a simple PIN. This has the following advantages:
<ul>
<li>Everybody knows what a PIN is, and it’s clearly not the same as a password.</li>
<li>Logging into WordPress bypasses the PIN, so you can’t lock yourself out</li>
<li>It’s just a WordPress plugin, so no server configuration is necessary.</li>
<li>You can change or remove the PIN from WordPress admin.</li>
</ul>

Site PIN

Prevent careless visitors by locking your site down with a PIN

Jesin A

This plugin adds an additional layer of protection for the wp-login.php page using <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digest_access_authentication" rel="nofollow ugc">HTTP Digest Authentication</a> with the PHP <a href="http://php.net/header" rel="nofollow ugc">header()</a> function. 
So it doesn’t require configuring web server files like .htaccess or <a href="https://websistent.com/tools/htdigest-generator-tool/" rel="nofollow ugc">.htdigest</a> and works on all web hosting environments.
Important: If you already have a plugin which does HTTP Authentication please deactivate it before activating this plugin. Similarly if you have configured your web server to do HTTP authentication on the wp-login.php file please remove it before using this plugin.
If you are using FastCGI PHP this plugin may keep prompting for the credentials even if you enter the right pair, in this case use the following in your <code>.htaccess</code> file
<pre><code><IfModule mod_setenvif.c>
SetEnvIfNoCase ^Authorization$ "(.+)" PHP_AUTH_DIGEST=$1
</IfModule>
</code></pre>
<h4>Advantages of HTTP Digest Authentication</h4>
<ul>
<li>Digest Authentication is very much safer than HTTP Basic Authentication whose credentials can be easily decoded with a <a href="http://www.base64decode.org/" rel="nofollow ugc">base64 decoder</a>.</li>
<li>From Wikipedia on <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_access_authentication" rel="nofollow ugc">HTTP Basic Authentication</a>:</li>
</ul>
<blockquote>
The BA (Basic Authentication) mechanism provides no confidentiality protection for the transmitted credentials. They are merely encoded with BASE64 in transit, but not encrypted or hashed in any way.
</blockquote>
<ul>
<li>Digest Authentication on the other hand uses <a href="https://websistent.com/tools/md5-encryption-tool/" rel="nofollow ugc">MD5</a> on the credentials making it “one way” </li>
<li>Uses server and client <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptographic_nonce" rel="nofollow ugc">nonce</a>s to prevent replay attacks</li>
</ul>
<h4>Features of the HTTP Digest Auth plugin</h4>
<ul>
<li>Works using PHP header() function and doesn’t require modification of service config files (like .htaccess, nginx.conf etc)</li>
<li>Supports HTTP credentials for each WordPress user</li>
<li>Clears the HTTP Digest credentials when the user logs out of WordPress (more on this in the FAQ)</li>
<li>Verifies if both the HTTP and WordPress credentials are of the same user (this is the default behavior and can be changed)</li>
<li>Works on all major Web Servers (Tested on Apache, Nginx and Lighttpd)</li>
</ul>
<h4>Plugin Behavior</h4>
<ul>
<li>When this plugin is activated for the first time all WordPress users will have the following Digest credentials 
Username: <WordPress username> 
Password: password 
This can be changed from Users > Your Profile.</li>
<li>After activating this plugin for the first time you’ll be prompted for HTTP credentials when you logout</li>
<li>Similarly if you change your HTTP username or password you’ll be prompted for this when you logout</li>
</ul>
<h4>Available languages</h4>
<ul>
<li>English</li>
<li>Serbo-Croatian by <a href="http://www.webhostinghub.com/" rel="nofollow ugc">Borisa Djuraskovic</a></li>
</ul>
The <a href="https://websistent.com/wordpress-plugins/http-digest-authentication/" rel="nofollow ugc">HTTP Digest Authentication Plugin</a> official homepage.

HTTP Digest Authentication

Protect your wp-login.php page with HTTP Digest Authentication without the need of adding web server modules or changing config files.

Site PIN vs HTTP Digest Authentication