Agent for SharePoint Guide › Federation and Claims-based Authentication › Claims-based Authentication Overview › Identity Provider (IdP)

Identity Provider (IdP)

An identity provider is a system that creates, maintains, and manages identity information and asserts identities to other service providers within a federation. For example, a user Adam, has an email address of adam@example.com and authenticated to this domain using a password mechanism.

An identity provider is also known as a SAML authority, asserting party, trusted identity provider, or source site, and is often abbreviated as IdP.

In the CA SiteMinder Agent for SharePoint solution, the Agent for SharePoint is the IdP STS. The identity provider owns the STS and affirms the tokens created by the STS.