Spring Security - Third Edition

Authentication

Authentication is one of two key security concepts that you must internalize when developing secure applications (the other being authorization). Authentication identifies who is attempting to request a resource. You may be familiar with authentication in your daily online and offline life, in very different contexts, as follows:

• Credential-based authentication: When you log in to your web-based email account, you most likely provide your username and password. The email provider matches your username with a known user in its database and verifies that your password matches what they have on record. These credentials are what the email system uses to validate that you are a valid user of the system. First, we'll use this type ...