REST stands for Representational State transfer which is an architectural style designed for web services that are loosely coupled. It is principally used to develop light weight, quick, adaptable and simple to keep up, web services that often utilize HTTP for communication. Industries are enormously dependent and accepting REST based architectures due to its ease of use. The REST web services must be secured from various forms of web attacks due to its light weight nature. Since REST is stateless in nature, the techniques for securing these services are different from standard web application which is managed by session management, but in the case of REST, the calling point may or may not be a web browser, so no session can be maintained. There are several mechanisms to secure REST based web services. In this study the focus is on: HTTP Basic, Digest Authentication, OAuth 2.