Access Control Service, or

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Access Control Service (ACS) was a

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-owned cloud-based service that provided an easy way of authenticating and authorizing users to gain access to

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s and services while allowing the features of

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and authorization to be factored out of the

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. This facilitates application development while at the same time providing users the benefit of being able to log into multiple applications with a reduced number of authentications, and in some cases only one authentication. The system provides an authorization store that can be accessed programmatically as well as via a

management Management (or managing) is the administration of an organization, whether it is a business, a nonprofit organization, or a government body. It is the art and science of managing resources of the business. Management includes the activities o ...

portal. Once authorizations are configured, a user coming to an application via ACS arrives at the application entrance with not only an authentication token, but also a set of authorization

claims Claim may refer to: * Claim (legal) * Claim of Right Act 1689 * Claims-based identity * Claim (philosophy) * Land claim * A ''main contention'', see conclusion of law * Patent claim * The assertion of a proposition; see Douglas N. Walton * A righ ...

attached to the token. ACS was retired by Microsoft on November 7, 2018.

Features

ACS has the following features * Integration with

Windows Identity Foundation Windows Identity Foundation (WIF) is a Microsoft software framework for building identity-aware applications. It provides APIs for building ASP.NET or WCF based security token services as well as tools for building claims-aware and federation ...

(WIF) * Support for the SAML 1.1,

SAML 2.0 Security Assertion Markup Language 2.0 (SAML 2.0) is a version of the SAML standard for exchanging authentication and authorization identities between security domains. SAML 2.0 is an XML-based protocol that uses security tokens conta ...

, Simple Web Token (SWT) and

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(JWT) token formats (JWT still in beta) * Integrated and customizable Home Realm Discovery that allows users to choose their identity provider * A browser-based management portal that allows administrative access to the ACS configuration

Web platform support

ACS supports all modern web platforms such as

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and

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. It can be used with both web applications and web services.

References

{{Reflist Authentication methods Access control software