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As with REST APIs, you'd want to be able to authenticate to a websocket-based API using either basic auth, or a bearer token-based auth scheme. Unfortunately, the browser websocket API doesn't allow you to specify arbitrary headers in the websocket request, so it's typical instead to have credentials supplied via a query param (such as "accessToken" for a bearer token) in the wss request.

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> so it's typical instead to have credentials supplied via a query param (such as "accessToken" for a bearer token) in the wss request.

If someone ends up actually doing this in a production system, remember to not to log the accessToken if you're logging full paths/URIs somewhere, as query params usually is a part of that type of logging.

Yup, true, although tokens should be ephemeral so less of a risk. Authenticating inline over the Websocket connection is valid too, but it does expose the socket connections to slightly more surface area of attack i.e. if you pass in a token as a param, the Websocket request can be rejected immediately. If however you authenticate after establishing a Websocket connection, then there is an attack vector where you simply open Websocket connections and never authenticate. Of course timeouts can be used to disconnect rogue actors, but it is a consideration.

Matt, Ably co-founder

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