The SCIM 1.1 servlet supports authentication using either the HTTP Basic authentication scheme, or OAuth 2.0 bearer tokens. When authenticating using HTTP Basic authentication, the SCIM 1.1 servlet attempts to correlate the user name component of the Authorization header to a DN in the Directory Proxy Server. If the user name value cannot be parsed directly as a DN, it is correlated to a DN using an Identity Mapper. The DN is then used in a simple bind request to verify the password.

In deployments that use an OAuth authorization server, the SCIM 1.1 extension can be configured to authenticate requests using OAuth bearer tokens. The SCIM 1.1 extension supports authentication with OAuth 2.0 bearer tokens (per RFC 6750) using an OAuth Token Handler Server SDK Extension. Because the OAuth 2.0 specification does not specify how contents of a bearer token are formatted, PingDirectoryProxy Server provides the token handler API to decode incoming bearer tokens and extract or correlate associated authorization DNs.

Neither HTTP Basic authentication nor OAuth 2.0 bearer token authentication are secure unless SSL is used to encrypt the HTTP traffic.