difference between windows based authentication and form based authentication and claim based authentication in sharepoint

Question

I am new to DotNet and Sharepoint and I want to understand difference between

• windows based authentication
• form based authentication
• claim based authentication Or if any of the above are identical.

Answer 1

Authentication modes determine how client computers authenticate with SharePoint Server 2010/2013 resources. Their are two AUthnetication Modes

1. Classic Mode This is no different from the traditional AD based authentication.You cannot configure the Forms based authentication if your web application is using Classic Mode Authentication.
2. Claims based Authentication. Claims based authenticaition gives you option to autheticate users using AD as well as Form based authentication for the same web application. It's based on Windows Identity Foundation, and can enable several advanced authentication scenarios as described in this article: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh394901(v=office.14).aspx

Now We have the Authentication Method

1. Windows authentication methods: provider is the default authentication provider for ASP.NET applications. When a user using this authentication logs in to an application, the credentials are matched with the Windows domain through IIS. their are 5 types of the authentication supported under this: NTLM, Kerberos, Anonymous, Basic, Digest

2. Forms-based authentication methods: Forms authentication is a stand alone method of authenticating in .NET forms that you can hook up to some other system, such as a database.

3. SAML token-based authentication methods SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language) is an Extensible Markup Language (XML) standard that allows a user to log on once for affiliated but separate Web sites. SAML is designed for business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) transactions.

Read this technet Article for more details, this will tell all the authentication method and their support with sharepoint versions: Plan for claims-based authentication or classic-mode authentication Plan authentication methods