Is there a way to authenticate that a user has entered their forum account and password correctly in my own software?  I'm not sure how the password hash's work and since I'm new here I'm not sure if there is some easy way to doing this.

Is your application on the same server/site, or is it on a different server? Is it on the same domain name?

If you are on the same domain name (where you can read the cookies) and the same server (where you can load up our PHP libraries) this isn't too difficult to do.

I believe I found something posted a bit ago:  

 

 

I believe this should be good enough to get me to verify a user account in a program I distribute that sends the user/pass to my own page on the server.

I am looking to do the same thing and was trying to see how it can be done with the API.  I am not seeing anything to authenticate by them submitting their username and password. Is there a way to log a user in using the REST API that is included?

25 minutes ago, JEFF MACK said:

Is there a way to log a user in using the REST API that is included?

No.

You'd need a custom developed solution. Which should be something that's simply a gateway file that accepts user / pass and attempts authentication.

You'd want SSL to ensure the data transfer is secure and your not exposing passwords to sniffers.