HTTP Basic Authentication is a HTTP/1.0 standard used by web servers to authenticate a client to allow access to particular web applications. It adds the username and password as a base 64 encoded string to an Authorization header.
To configure HTTP Basic Authentication when using a resource, select the Http-Security tab within the REST Resource Security Configuration dialog.
Enabling basic authentication will add the header Authorization: Basic {myEncodedUsername:myEncodedPassword} to the HTTP Request.
Alternatively, you can set your own Authorization header using field substitutions within your REST Web Service Resource. For basic authentication you will need to base64 encode your credentials using services.encryption.
Basic authentication should be used on a secure network (TLS), this is because the credentials are encoded but not encrypted.