application authentication design ideas

I am working with on an app that uses wpf / silverlight on the front end and nhibernate on the back end, and looking for some design ideas to address authentication; I was looking at Rhino Security which I think is pretty slick and certainly useful, but doesn't in and of itself seem to address authentication.

That said, I am looking for something of a technology agnostic overview of authentication design issues at this point. Does anyone have any links and / or experie开发者_运维百科nces with an authentication design that is relatively easy to adapt to different common technologies.

Cheers,

Berryl

I am using an hierarchical RBAC pattern for my application. I am using the table design from yii for this - and it works pretty nice (in the first step we would like to use the yii rbac client to manage the authentications).