Integrated Windows Authentication

Integrated Windows authentication enables users to log in with their Windows credentials, using Kerberos or NTLM. The client sends credentials in the Authorization header. Windows authentication is best suited for an intranet environment. For more information, see Windows Authentication.

If your application is hosted on Azure and you have an on-premise Active Directory domain, consider federating your on-premise AD with Azure Active Directory. That way, users can log in with their on-premise credentials, but the authentication is performed by Azure AD. For more information, see Azure Authentication.

To create an application that uses Integrated Windows authentication, select the “Intranet Application” template in the MVC 4 project wizard. This project template puts the following setting in the Web.config file:

<system.web>
    <authentication mode="Windows" />
</system.web>

On the client side, Integrated Windows authentication works with any browser that supports the Negotiate authentication scheme, which includes most major browsers. For .NET client applications, the HttpClient class supports Windows authentication:

HttpClientHandler handler = new HttpClientHandler()
{
    UseDefaultCredentials = true
};

HttpClient client = new HttpClient(handler);

Windows authentication is vulnerable to cross-site request forgery (CSRF) attacks. See Preventing Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) Attacks.

This article was originally created on December 18, 2012

Author Information

Mike Wasson – Mike Wasson is a programmer-writer at Microsoft.