Which encoding is used to protect a username and login with RESTful API basic authentication?

RESTful API basic authentication employs Base64 encoding to transform the username and password (concatenated with a colon) into a string that can be safely transmitted over HTTP. Although it is not an encryption method, it serves as a common encoding standard for this authentication mechanism, often used in conjunction with HTTPS for secure communication.

MD5 is a cryptographic hashing algorithm used for data integrity verification or one-way password storage, not for encoding credentials for basic authentication.

SHA-1 is a cryptographic hashing algorithm, similar to MD5, used for digital signatures or integrity checks, and is not utilized for encoding basic authentication credentials.

Type-7 is a proprietary, weak obfuscation scheme used by Cisco IOS for storing passwords in configuration files, and it is not a standard encoding method for RESTful API basic authentication.