"The topic of authentication in REST architectures is a debatable one; there are several ways to do it, not all of them practical, not all RESTful; no standard and a lot of room for confusion. Ever since I got into REST, this was the one thing which wasn’t evident to me, even after a decent amount of research. Recently I got the time to dive deeper in the problem, evaluated thoroughly the alternatives and made my conclusions. While they may be inaccurate at some degree, I gather them here since I found no one place that would present the topic in a friendly fashion."
http://facundoolano.wordpress.com/2013/12/23/my-take-on-restful-authentication/