Authentication providers

The ASP.net architecture includes the concept of and authentication provider a piece of code whose job is to verify credentials and decide whether a particular request should be considered authenticated.
Selecting an authentication provider is as simple as making an entry in the web.config file for the application. You can use one of these entries to select the corresponding built in authentication provider:
1.Windows Authentication
It  provider lets you authenticates users based on their windows accounts. This provider uses IIS to perform the authentication and then passes the authenticated identity to your code. This is the default provided for ASP.net.

<authentication mode="Windows">
<forms name=" AuthenticationDemo"  loginUrl="logon.aspx" protection="All" path="/" timeout="30" />
</authentication> 3.Passport authentication


2. Forms authentication

 It provider uses custom HTML forms to collect authentication information and lets you use your own logic to authenticate users. The user's credentials are stored in a cookie for use during the session.

<authentication mode="forms">
<forms name=" AuthenticationDemo" loginUrl="logon.aspx" protection="All" path="/" timeout="30" />
</authentication>

3.Passport Authentication

It provider authenticates users  on Microsoft's passport service to authenticate users of your application

</authentication mode="passport">
<forms name=" AuthenticationDemo" loginUrl="logon.aspx" protection="All" path="/" timeout="30" />
</authentication>