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.