An identity provider is a system entity that creates, maintains, and manages identity information for principals while providing authentication services to relying applications within a federation or distributed network. Identity providers offer user authentication as a service. Relying party applications, such as web applications, outsource the user authentication step to a trusted identity provider. Such a relying party application is said to be federated, that is, it consumes federated identity. An identity provider is “a trusted provider that lets you use single sign-on to access other websites.” SSO enhances usability by reducing password fatigue. It also provides better security by decreasing the potential attack surface. Identity providers can facilitate connections between cloud computing resources and users, thus decreasing the need for users to re-authenticate when using mobile and roaming applications.
is an open standarddecentralizedauthentication protocol that uses OAuth 2.0 and enables services to verify the identity of a user represented by a URL as well as to obtain an access token that can be used to access resources under the control of the user. In the IndieAuth model, a user’s identity links to their preferred identity provider, which can be their own site, or delegated to a third party authorization endpoint.
OpenID provider
is an identity layer on top of OAuth. In the domain model associated with OIDC, an identity provider is a specialtype of OAuth 2.0 authorization server. Specifically, a system entity called an OpenID Provider issues JSON-formatted identity tokens to OIDC relying parties via a RESTfulHTTPAPI.
The Security Assertion Markup Language is a set of profiles for exchanging authentication and authorization data across security domains. In the SAML domain model, an identity provider is a special type of authentication authority. Specifically, a SAML identity provider is a system entity that issues authentication assertions in conjunction with an SSO profile of SAML. A relying party that consumes these authentication assertions is called a SAML service provider.
