SSO services MFA with SmartCard or windows hello

Thomas Lambert 1

Hi there,

I've been looking on multiple places, and please excuse my question if this seems basic level.

I would like to change our 2FA for the sso of all our applications. Since all our employees have smartcards and their readers i wanted to see how possible is either to use that as the 2FA.

I've been reading both
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/authentication/concept-mfa-howitworks
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/authentication/concept-authentication-methods

yet, i think i have a missunderstandment between windows auth (the login) and online sso 2fa (like when you try to open any federated sso app

Marilee Turscak-MSFT 34,306 Reputation points Microsoft Employee

2021-08-24T23:27:14.49+00:00

Windows Auth is a type of SSO. There's a good explanation of the differences here: https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/152179/single-sign-on-vs-nt-authentication

As for smart card authentication, there are some good resources here for setting this up:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/53885/setting-up-smart-card-authentication-to-domain.html
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/hybrid/choose-ad-authn
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-desktop/authentication

What was your main concern?