Introduction to authentication

Authentication is the act of confirming a user’s identity, for example, by providing a set of credentials.

As part of an access management strategy, authentication is tightly coupled with authorization; usually, not only is it important to confirm that a user is who they say they are, but also to ensure that they can only access a subset of information.

Consider a user who wants to access an online shop. As the owner of the shop, you want to ensure the user identity is confirmed (as it’s tied to their shipping and email addresses and payment information). You also want to ensure that they can only access their own information.

You can deploy a web agent on the web server hosting the online shop. The agent redirects the user’s request to an PingOne Advanced Identity Cloud login page, where the user enters their credentials, such as username and password. PingOne Advanced Identity Cloud determines who the user is, and whether the user has the right to access the protected page. PingOne Advanced Identity Cloud then redirects the user back to the protected page with authorization credentials that can be verified by the agent. The agent allows the user authorized by PingOne Advanced Identity Cloud to access the page.

In the same way, you can also use PingOne Advanced Identity Cloud to protect physical devices connected on the Internet of Things (IoT). For example, a delivery van tracking system could have its proxying gateway authenticate to a brokering system using an X.509 certificate to allow it to enable an HTTPS protocol and then connect to sensors in its delivery trucks. If the X.509 certificate is valid, the brokering system can monitor a van’s fuel consumption, speed, mileage, and overall engine condition to maximize each van’s operating efficiency.

PingOne Advanced Identity Cloud uses authentication nodes and journeys to implement authentication.

PingOne Advanced Identity Cloud creates an authentication session to track the user’s progress through an authentication journey. After the user has authenticated, PingOne Advanced Identity Cloud creates a session to manage the user’s access to resources. To learn more about sessions, refer to Sessions.