Identification of hadronic tau decays in CMS

The algorithm used for reconstruction and identification of hadronic tau decays by the CMS experiment at the LHC will be presented. The tau reconstruction in CMS takes advantage of the particle-flow algorithm which allows to reconstruct individual hadronic decay modes. The performance of the algorithm in terms of tau identification efficiency and in terms of the rates with which jets, electrons and muons are misidentified as hadronic tau decays, is measured in $pp$ collision data recorded in 2012 at a center--of--mass energy of 8 TeV, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 19.7 fb$^{-1}$.