You can configure your server to authenticate, or determine a user's Windows NT account identity, before allowing that user to establish a network connection with your server. However, user authentication occurs only when anonymous access is disabled or when the Windows NT File System (NTFS) permissions require users to identify themselves with a valid Windows NT account user name and password.
As a server administrator, you should carefully choose an authentication method that meets both your security requirements and the capabilities of your user's Web browser.
This section contains:
- About Authentication: A useful conceptual overview of authentication.
- Selecting Authentication Methods: A procedure for selecting an authentication method.
- Configuring the Anonymous Access Account: Follow this important procedure for setting anonymous Web server access.
- Setting the Default Logon Domain: A procedure for configuring the Basic authentication logon domain.
- Enabling Basic Authentication: Steps for enabling your Web server's Basic authentication feature.
- Notifying Clients of Password Status: A feature that allows administrators to notify clients of Windows NT password expiration status.
- Enabling Windows NT Challenge/Response Authentication: A procedure for activating the cryptographic Challenge/Response authentication feature.
- Setting Up SSL on Your Server: An overview procedure for setting up Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) on your server.
- Creating and Managing Server Key Pairs: A procedure for creating and manipulating encryption key pairs.
- Obtaining a Server Certificate: Learn how to obtain an server certificate needed to use SSL.
- Adding a Certificate Authority Certificate to Your Server: Add new certificate authorities to your server's list of trusted issuing authorities.
- About Client Certificates: Learn about digital identification authentication.
- Obtaining a Client Certificate: An overview about obtaining user digital identifications, called client certificates.
- Enabling Client Certificates: A procedure for enabling SSL authentication of client certificates.
- Obtaining Client Certificate Information with ASP: Learn how to add to your Web pages an ASP sever-side script to that extracts and saves the contents of a user's client certificate to a text file.
- Mapping Client Certificates to User Accounts: Use client certificates to connect users directly to Windows NT accounts.
This section does not contain information on:
- Regulating how users access your Web server files and directories; see Access Control.
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