SharePoint 2013 provider hosted app w/ADFS user converted authenticates to windows user no SAML user

Question

I have a High Trust Provider hosted app using the configuration and claims helper from this blog post .

The app can authenticate as app only but when I pass in the user information I get "There was an error: Access denied. You do not have permission to perform this action or access this resource. " The SharePoint logs show that my user is being resolved as the windows user not the SAML user. This is further proven by if I add the windows account the app will authenticate and provide me the user context. What am I doing wrong?

JWT token:

{
    "upn": "dpalfery@ssolab.local", 
    "nii": "trusted:adfs", 
    "aud": "00000003-0000-0ff1-ce00-000000000000/portal.ssolab.local@ab32783d-87a4-4705-ba23-ae2ec8134272", 
    "iss": "8a7656d9-a909-4304-9c3f-0320b175015e@ab32783d-87a4-4705-ba23-ae2ec8134272", 
    "exp": "1395592109", 
    "actortoken": "<decoded below>", 
    "nbf": "1395591509"
}
{
    "upn": "dpalfery@ssolab.local", 
    "identityprovider": "trusted:ADFS", 
    "iss": "8a7656d9-a909-4304-9c3f-0320b175015e@ab32783d-87a4-4705-ba23-ae2ec8134272", 
    "smtp": "dpalfery@ssolab.local", 
    "trustedfordelegation": "true", 
    "exp": "1455591509", 
    "nameid": "8a7656d9-a909-4304-9c3f-0320b175015e@ab32783d-87a4-4705-ba23-ae2ec8134272", 
    "nbf": "1395591509", 
    "aud": "00000003-0000-0ff1-ce00-000000000000/portal.ssolab.local@ab32783d-87a4-4705-ba23-ae2ec8134272"
}

SharePoint Log:

03/23/2014 10:37:45.70 w3wp.exe (0x0B1C) 0x282C SharePoint Foundation Application Authentication ahkpt Medium SPApplicationAuthenticationModule Authentication finished successfully for user:0#.w|ssolab\dpalfery and actor:0i.t|ms.sp.ext|8a7656d9-a909-4304-9c3f-0320b175015e@ab32783d-87a4-4705-ba23-ae2ec8134272 401c809c-043a-2027-b3cc-8517dffcb09a

Answer 1

You didn't specify enough info to be 100% sure, but it is likely one of the following:

• Need to specify -IsTrustBroker when creating the SPTrustedSecurityTokenIssuer
• User is not found in the user profile application (discussed in Steve's post)
• The identity claim is not unique in the user profile application. (Steve explicitly calls this out -- cannot have both claim user and windows user.)