What is Claims-Based Identity, and Why Should You Care?
There are many features in a typical secure application, three of the most common being:
- Authentication: “Who are you?”
- Authorization: “Are you allowed to do this?”
- Personalization: “How can I personalize your experience?”
This guide will introduce you to “claims-based” identity, a set of ideas and tools that may make it easier for you to build features like these into your apps in a more flexible way. In this guide, we’ll introduce some concepts that may sound new: claims, federated identity, and much more. But many of the ideas presented here have been floating around for a long time.
The protocols we’ll show in this guide have a similar flavor to Kerberos, one of the most broadly accepted authentication protocols in use today (used in Active Directory for example). WS-Federation, SAML, and other federated identity protocols have been incubating for this entire decade. This is really not so new after all, but it does require a new way of thinking as we move toward a better architecture for identity in applications.
Claims based identity is specially compelling for applications that are deployed to the cloud. This Guide covers such scenarios.
| Claims-based identity isn’t new. It’s been being designed and implemented for almost a decade. |
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Just Released! - Book content on MSDN.
Why do we need a guide now?
Only within the last year have tools been released to make claims-based identity generally available to applications on the Windows platform. With the Windows Identity Framework (WIF), Active Directory Federation Services v2 (ADFS), the identity landscape has opened up quite a bit, and our goal in this guide is to show how you can benefit by understanding these concepts and using these tools.
How is the Guide Organized?
The Guide will contain a few introductory chapters that will cover the basics of Claims based Identity, common terminology, protocols and technologies. This is the "theory" part of the book and we hope it will be useful for those new to the subject. Claims based identity is surprisingly simple and yet very powerful. Then, there will be a number of chapters with "case studies". These are very specific, commonly occurring scenarios where we surface goals, challenges and solutions in concrete contexts. As examples of the kind of scenarios we are considering, take a look at these three blog posts:
WebSSOFederationSoftware as a Service - Part ISoftware as a Service - Part II
Check the downloads section for early chapters and samples!
Downloads
Blogs
Dominick Baier:
Vittorio Bertocci
Keith Brown:
Eugenio Pace:
Erwin van der Valk
Matias Woloski