# Authentication Providers

Authentication Providers are used to authenticate connections to Ports. Many Authentication Providers can be configured on the Broker at the same time, from which each Port can be assigned one.

The following authentication providers are supported:

- Anonymous: allows anonymous connections to the broker

- External: delegates to external mechanisms such as SSL Client Certificate Authentication

- Kerberos: uses Kerberos to authenticate connections via GSS-API.

- SimpleLDAP: authenticate users against an LDAP server.

- PlainPasswordFile: authenticate users against credentials stored in plain text in a local file.

- Base64MD5PasswordFile: authenticate users against credentials stored encoded in a local file.

The Password File based providers can perform explicit management (adding, removing, changing passwords) of users via the Brokers management interfaces. The other providers offer no ability to manage users as they either have no scope for user management (e.g Anonymous) or delegate this task to other systems (e.g LDAP).

The configuration details for Authentication Providers are covered in .