What are these extra bytes in the http basic header?

Question

When i try to connect to my TPLINK TL-WR841N routers webserver, my browser sends credentials in the following format.

Cookie: Authorization=Basic%20YWRtaW46MjEyMzJmMjk3YTU3YTVhNzQzODk0YTBlNGE4MDFmYzM%3D

By using sources option in the browser, i figure out that the base64 string is actually the result of the following function i.e.

BASE64{username:md5(password)}

instead of basic authentication method which should be

BASE64(username:password)

Here is the snippet

There are three extra bytes at the start and end of the string i.e. {%20,%3D}.

What these bytes represents ?

Couldn't found anything relate to it in RFC-7617

Alakdae · Accepted Answer · 2019-11-19 09:10:02Z

1

They are just ' ' and '=' characters encoded in HTML.

answered Nov 19, 2019 at 9:10

Alakdae

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