[…]
Upon receipt of the message, the server will verify the presented (in
the message) authentication identity (authcid) and password (passwd)
with the system authentication database, and it will verify that the
authentication credentials permit the client to act as the (presented
or derived) authorization identity (authzid). If both steps succeed,
the user is authenticated.
[…]
When no authorization identity is provided, the server derives an
authorization identity from the prepared representation of the
provided authentication identity string. This ensures that the
derivation of different representations of the authentication
identity produces the same authorization identity.”
-- <https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4616#section-2>