Authentication vs Authorization

When thinking about security, two key concepts to understand are authentication, and authorization. Authentication has to do with ensuring that a user who logs into the system is who they say they are. Authorization pertains to ensuring that the authenticated user has access to something within the system. When you think about authentication, think username and password or single sign on. Conversly, when you think authorization think "should the user have access to this". This article primarily focuses on authentication, and the different ways you can configure users to authenticate within the Kineitc Platform.

Internal vs SSO

Authenticating internally means a user having both a user and a password set up in the platform and authenticating with those. This is how things are preconfigured.

It is possible, though, to set up Single Sign On or SSO. This means the users will have a user in the platform but the user is also in another system (for example, LDAP) and the password from that other system will authenticate the user into the Kinetic Platform.

Detailed instructions are provided on how to set up LDAP, SAML, and X509 support.