prevent expansion of references in gradle build file

I have a block like this in my gradle build file:

repositories {
    maven {
        url "${url}"
        authentication {
            basic(BasicAuthentication)
        }
    }
}

but the reference to BasicAuthentication keeps expanding to

sun.net.www.protocol.http.BasicAuthentication

when I'm making modifications to the build, which then breaks my build.

Is there a way to prevent the expansion of BasicAuthentication?