A claim is a piece of information about a particular subject. It can be anything that the subject is owned by or associated with, such as name, group, preferences, etc. A claim provides a single and general notion to define the identity information related to the subject. Claim-based identity is a common way for any application to acquire the identity information. It provides a consistent approach for all applications by hiding the lower level implementation. Claims are also used in identity propagation which is the replication of authenticated identities, by packaging the claims into one or more tokens (such as SAML). These tokens are then issued by an issuer (eg., security token service (STS) ).
The Claim Management component of WSO2 Carbon allows you to map a set of attributes from the underlying user store to a set of defined claims. The underlying user store can either be an internal or external JDBC user store, Active Directory or LDAP user store. You can configure the primary user store using the user-mgt.xml file. Each claim can be uniquely identified within the claim dialect by the Claim URI. Claim Claim URIs are independent from the user store and each claim URI can be mapped into any desired attribute in the user store. Therefore, at the application level we would know about the claims, but not the attribute of the user store. An advantage of this is that we do not need to be concerned about the user store level when we develop an application as it is hidden by the claim management.
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