Securing an RSS Feed

By Blane Warrene | July 21, 2005 | Open Source

While Kevin has pointed out some important issues in regards to Greasemonkey – I found this new concept for securing an RSS feed an invaluable tip.

Joe Gregorio wanted a way to syndicate content for himself and appears to be onto a method. With some tweaking perhaps this could also be explored as a way to distribute paid content to a restricted audience…?

Written By:

Blane Warrene

Blane is a writer and researcher focusing on Apple and Open Source technologies. Prior to this, he helped found a commercial software and consulting venture, and worked in the financial services sector as a director of technology and in varying technical roles. Blane maintains Open Sourcery: SitePoint's Open Source Blog.

Website
>> More Posts By Blane Warrene

{ 5 comments }

Charlie Wood August 25, 2005 at 10:41 pm: Yes, most RSS readers support Basic HTTP Auth, which when used with SSL makes for a secure feed. I thought Bloglines did, but there was some issue with their requiring you to put you username:password directly in the feed URL, which is obviously a Bad Thing. Anyway, Basic Auth + SSL (so passwords aren’t sent in the clear) is the way to go.
Cheers,
charlie
http://spanningpartners.com
Darren884 July 24, 2005 at 4:03 pm: Pretty cool. Couldn’t you use an easier way by just using a get method of username and password retrieval on the url you were going to parse?
Icheb July 23, 2005 at 4:15 pm: $_SERVER['PHP_AUTH_USER'] is used for htaccess authentication. Do RSS readers support that in the first place?
dschultz July 22, 2005 at 1:20 pm: Very timely blog – just yesterday i spent a couple hours searching on google for a way to create a password protect my RSS feed. If you have your username / passwords in MySQL, i *THINK* (haven’t full tested this yet) you can just use the PHP variable:
$_SERVER['PHP_AUTH_USER'];
Using the header function i think you can make this work:
if (!isset($_SERVER['PHP_AUTH_USER'])) {
//prompt for username / password
} else {
//check PW with MySQL, if successful spit out the RSS feed.
}
Hope that helps!
charmedlover July 22, 2005 at 7:42 am: Very interesting, I figured that it would eventually happen. Paid RSS feeds were a sure-thing once it goes commercial.