Chapter 6. What Is Authentication?
Authentication answers the question, Who are you? When Alice logs in to a machine, the machine challenges her to prove her identity by asking for a password (or something else, like a smartcard). This is one example of authentication. Another is when Alice is already logged in to a machine and requests a file from another machine via a file share. Even though she's already logged in to the local machine, that doesn't help the remote machine at all. The remote machine wants proof that this is really a request from Alice as opposed to some attacker on the network just pretending to be her. Kerberos (Item 59) is an example of a network authentication protocol that protects most Windows systems.
It sometimes helps ...
Get The .NET Developer's Guide to Windows Security now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
