ASP.NET Core Identity is the new powerful, pluggable, and extensible security system developed on .NET and it can be used with ASP.NET Core applications. It provides greater control over database schema, linking with an existing application's database, and provides APIs to perform user management, role management, and signing in/signing out options.
By default, it is configured with SQL Server, but as it supports Entity Framework on the backend, other database servers can also be used that are supported by the Entity Framework. For example, you can use Oracle, SQLite, or Postgres and also attach other non-relational data providers such as MongoDB and NoSQL as well.
As far as the authentication models are concerned, it provides various built-in OWIN based middleware that can be simply added into the middleware pipeline to support social authentication, OAuth authentication, and so on.
Here are a few of the benefits of using the ASP.NET Core Identity framework in an enterprise application:
- One ASP.NET Identity system: One ASP.NET Identity system that can be used with all the application frameworks of ASP.NET, starting from ASP.NET Core MVC 6, web forms, web pages, web API, and SignalR.
- Schema modification: The default security database schema can easily be modified using the Entity Framework Code First model. Extensions of existing tables or the creation of new tables can easily be done by defining POCO classes and making a DbSet entry in the Context class.
- Providers: Various providers that can be added as a middleware component and offer easy integration with any application.
- Easy enablement of user restriction: User access can easily be restricted by defining roles, claims, and policies, and it can be linked with any MVC controller class or action method.
- OWIN Integration: Based on OWIN middleware and it can be used with any OWIN based host. It uses OWIN Authentication for login/logout scenarios.
- NuGet package: Can easily be used and added into your project as a NuGet package.