About Identity Providers

In this topic, you learn about Oracle Identity Cloud Service Identity providers.

An identity provider, also known as an "authentication authority", provides external authentication for users who want to sign into Identity Cloud Service using their external provider’s credentials.

For example, a customer may want its users to log in using their ADFS credentials and gain access to Oracle Cloud Services. In this case, MS ADFS acts as the identity provider and Oracle Identity Cloud Service functions as the service provider. MS ADFS authenticates the user and returns a token containing identity and authentication information to Oracle Identity Cloud Service (for example, the user name and the email address of the user). This security token is digitally signed by the IDP. The SP verifies the signature on the token and then uses the identity information to establish an authenticated session for the user. This is known as federated single sign-on where a user is challenged for credentials in one domain and is granted access to another domain.