Claim Dialects

What Are Claims?

Conceptually, a “claim” represents a piece of information related to a particular entity (in most cases, a user), typically being sworn to by an identity provider when a token or assertion is obtained.

In practice, claims are typically a collection of name/value pairs. The example below shows a collection of name/value pairs that you might find in something like an OpenID Connect (OIDC)id_token.

{
    "family_name": "Smith",
    "given_name": "John",
    "middle_name": "B",
    "preferred_username": "jsmith",
    "website": "https://brandtegrity.io",
    "locale": "en-GB"
    "gender": "male"
    "updated_at": 2352123875,
}

Claims Related Concepts

There are a number of concepts within Strivacity associated with claims:

• Account Attributes: Account attributes are configured on an Identity Store and represent the root meaning of a piece of customer data. See documentation on account attributes.
• Native Claims: Native claims represent how customer data is expressed within Strivacity. This is a layer of abstraction that allow Account Attributes to be associated with Dialects or Mappings.
• Claim Dialects: Dialects represent how customer data is expressed outside of Strivacity. For instance, a dialect could control how customer data is expressed within something like an OIDC id_token.
• Claim Mappings: Mappings represent how customer data is mapped into Strivacity. For instance, a mapping could control how data is obtained from a Social Login profile such as Facebook, into an Identity Store.

Why Do I Need Claim Dialects?

Because of the standards centric nature of customer identity, it is advantageous to have a high level of customization with regards to how a brand stores, displays and shares user profile data. Customers may be acquired in a variety of means: via standard registration UI, via federation protocols such as SAML/OIDC, or via social login. Customers may also be federated out to other systems controlled by a brand via similar protocols.

Claim Dialects are used to define a relationship between account attributes within an identity store and claims within a token or assertion. It is this management of claims, or a Dialect, that allows Strivacity to express account attributes as any defined claims that an application may require.

Claim Mappings

In addition to Claim Dialects, admins can also manage Claim Mappings for any social login or enterprise login providers. This provides full control over the scope of what customer account information is synchronized and stored from social or federation platforms with Strivacity.

For further information see Social Login Claim Mappings and Enterprise Login Customer Data Handling.