Authentication protects the identity of the user so that user credentials cannot be intercepted by malicious hackers when transmitted over the network. See Authentication for an overview.

The Oracle driver supports the following methods of authentication:

  • User ID/password authentication authenticates the user to the database using a database user name and password specified by the application.
  • Kerberos authentication uses Kerberos, a trusted third-party authentication service, to verify user identities. Kerberos authentication can take advantage of the user name and password maintained by the operating system to authenticate users to the database or use another set of user credentials specified by the application.

    This method requires knowledge of how to configure your Kerberos environment and supports Windows Active Directory Kerberos and MIT Kerberos.

  • NTLM authentication is a single sign-on OS authentication method. This method provides authentication from Windows clients only and requires minimal configuration.
  • Client authentication uses the user ID of the user logged onto the system on which the driver is running to authenticate the user to the database. The Oracle database server relies on the client to authenticate the user and does not provide additional authentication.
Note: Because the database server does not authenticate the user when client authentication is used, use this method of authentication if you can guarantee that only trusted clients can access the database server.

Except for NTLM authentication, which provides authentication for Windows clients only, these authentication methods provide authentication when the driver is running on any supported platform.

The AuthenticationMethod connection property controls which authentication mechanism the driver uses when establishing connections. See Using the AuthenticationMethod Property for information about setting the value for this property.