An introduction authentication

When dealing with sensitive information or paywalled content in an application, having safe client-server communication is key. Certain things require limited access. This is usually achieved by passing some credentials, and we can refer to this use of credentialing as "authentication".

More precisely, we can define authentication as the following:

Authentication is the process of exchanging user credentials for a piece of unique identification.

There are several possible ways to authenticate a user in your application, and they all come with their own pros and cons, depending on what you want to achieve.

In this tutorial, we'll compare two of the most commonly used authentication types, list their pros and cons, and point out their use cases.