Chapter 3. Security
This chapter covers
Recently I decided to move to the United States from the United Kingdom. I already had a passport, but in order to live and work in the United States, I needed to apply for a visa. This is a good analogy of how authentication and authorization work in both SharePoint and your back-end data source. My passport simply provides customs and immigration with information about me (my credentials); my visa, which is printed inside my passport, provides me with permissions to live and work within the United States. The same applies to SharePoint and the back-end data source. Every user has a username and password that form his credentials. Any roles that the user has, or permissions applied to that user, allow him to carry out a particular task (for example, being able to read a table or create an item in a SharePoint list). So authentication represents who you are, whereas authorization represents what you can do.