Mapping Authentication and Authorization: Credentials, Sessions, Tokens, Claims and ASP.NET Core's Authentication Handler Model
Authentication finds out who you are, authorization decides what you may do; in ASP.NET Core the first fills HttpContext.User through named schemes and handlers, the second checks policies and calls challenge (401) or forbid (403). We name credentials, sessions, tokens and claims, combine cookies and JWT with a policy scheme, and show why an endpoint returning Results.Ok still answers 302 on .NET 10.
8 Nov 2026
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11 min
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6
