What are the authentication methods in .NET?

There are 4 types of authentications.

1. WINDOWS AUTHENTICATION
2. FORMS AUTHENTICATION
3. PASSPORT AUTHENTICATION
4. NONE/CUSTOM AUTHENTICATION

The authentication option for the ASP.NET application is specified by using the tag in the Web.config file, as shown below:

1. WINDOWS AUTHENTICATION Schemes

1. Integrated Windows authentication
2. Basic and basic with SSL authentication
3. Digest authentication
4. Client Certificate authentication

<system.web>
<authentication mode="Windows"/>
</system.web>

2. FORMS AUTHENTICATION
You, as a Web application developer, are supposed to develop the Web page and authenticate the user by checking the provided user ID and password against some user database

<configuration>
<system.web>
<authentication mode="Forms"/>
<forms name="login"loginUrl="login.aspx" />
<authorization>
<deny users="?"/>
</authorization>
</system.web>
</configuration>

3. PASSPORT AUTHENTICATION
A centralized service provided by Microsoft, offers a single logon point for clients. Unauthenticated users are redirected to the Passport site

<configuration>
<system.web>
<authentication mode="Passport">
<passport redirectUrl="login.aspx" />
</authentication>
< authorization>
< deny users="?" />
</authorization>
</system.web>
</configuration>

4. NONE/CUSTOM AUTHENTICATION:
If we don’t want ASP.NET to perform any authentication, we can set the authentication mode to “none”. The reason behind this decision could be: We don’t want to authenticate our users, and our Web site is open for all to use. We want to provide our own custom authentication