Configuring Inbound Authentication for a Service Provider

The responsibility of the inbound authenticators component is to identify and parse all the incoming authentication requests and then build the corresponding response. A given inbound authenticator has two parts.

• Request Processor

• Response Builder

For each protocol supported by the WSO2 Identity Server, there should be an inbound authenticator. The Identity Server includes inbound authenticators for SAML 2.0, OpenID, OpenID Connect, OAuth 2.0, Kerberos KDC, WS-Trust STS and WS-Federation (passive). The responsibility of the SAML 2.0 request processor is to accept a SAML request from a service provider, validate the SAML request and then build a common object model understood by the authentication framework and handover the request to it. The responsibility of the SAML response builder is to accept a common object model from the authentication framework and build a SAML response out of it.

Both the request processors and the response builders are protocol aware, while the authentication framework is not coupled to any protocol. See Architecture for more information on the complete flow where inbound authenticators come into play.

You can configure the following for inbound authentication.

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