Secure HttpWebRequest so I can send credentials possible?
<p>I have the following code which connects to my php server and retrieves data from it. The only thing is, I need to send the username and password securely from this webrequest to the PHP server. Looking at the docs for the webrequest class, there is a credentials property as well as a preauthenticate property. I'm assuming these are for the network credentials (all my users are in AD).</p>

<p>Is it possible to secure this post request with credentials or is this just a bad idea? I've also found SetBasicAuthHeader - I'll read up on this and see if it might help. All traffic will be on SSL from ASPX site to the PHP site</p>

<pre><code>    // variables to store parameter values
    string url = "https://myphpserver.php";

    // creates the post data for the POST request
    string postData = "Username=" + username + "&amp;Password=" + "&amp;UID=" + UniqueRecID;

    // create the POST request
    HttpWebRequest webRequest = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(url);
    webRequest.Method = "POST";
    webRequest.ContentType = "application/x-www-form-urlencoded";
    webRequest.ContentLength = postData.Length;

    // POST the data
    using (StreamWriter requestWriter2 = new StreamWriter(webRequest.GetRequestStream()))
    {
        requestWriter2.Write(postData);
    }

    //  This actually does the request and gets the response back
    HttpWebResponse resp = (HttpWebResponse)webRequest.GetResponse();

    string responseData = string.Empty;

    using (StreamReader responseReader = new StreamReader(webRequest.GetResponse().GetResponseStream()))
    {
        // dumps the HTML from the response into a string variable
        responseData = responseReader.ReadToEnd();
    }
</code></pre>
