Claims Authentication - STS

Question

I was watching this great video on Channel 9 by Venky.

http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Identity/Sharepoint-2010-and-Claims-Based-Identity/

This talks about highlevel view on Claims Identity and STS. I have following questions from the video: a. It talks about converting Outgoing claim tokem getting issued from STS on WFE and then Converted to SharePoint Claim by STS at Application Server. Do we have STS installed on every SharePoint server? or STS is a central server used by whole FARM?

b. Also, it says towards the end, its the same STS as its using the same certificate from config DB. So it's the same STS or different STS using same certificate?

Thanks.

Answer 1

There is a more recent video from Tech Ed North America here that describes implementing Claims Based Authentication with SharePoint 2010.

To answer your questions, the STS is installed once for the entire Farm. Information can be found here to describe the architecture.

For the certificates, the root certificate is stored once for the entire farm. This information is mentioned in the video I linked to above.

There is also a Patterns and Practices guide on Claims Based Authentication, with content specifically for SharePoint implementations.