Federated Authentication Service Configuration

Federated Authentication Service (FAS) provide single sign-on to VDAs using certificate authentication. This is useful when using authentication methods such as SAML, where StoreFront does not have access to the Active Directory credentials.

Before enabling FAS for a store, you must configure the list of FAS servers using Group policy. For more details see FAS documentation.

To enable FAS for a store, you must use the PowerShell cmdlet Set-STFStoreLaunchOptions to set the VDA logon data logon provider to FASLogonDataProvider.

For example to enable FAS for a store and select the server at login:

To disable FAS for a store:

Substitute [VirtualPath] for the appropriate virtual path, e.g. /Citrix/Store.

When using username and password authentication on a store with FAS enabled, StoreFront always uses FAS rather than the supplied credentials for single sign-on.

By default, StoreFront selects the FAS server at launch. You can change this so that StoreFront selects the FAS server at login. This is not normally required but you can enable this if FAS selection is slow to avoid delays at launch. To configure the behavior, run PowerShell cmdlet Set-STFClaimsFactoryNames with parameter ClaimsFactoryName. To choose the FAS server at login, set it to FASClaimsFactory. To restore the default behavior and choose a FAS server at launch, set it to standardClaimsFactory.

For example to choose a FAS server at log in:

If the FAS server is unavailable the launch fails by default. However, you can configure StoreFront such that if the FAS server is unavailable, users can sign on to the VDA by entering their credentials. To change the configuration use PowerShell cmdlet Set-STFStoreLaunchOptions with parameter FederatedAuthenticationServiceFailover. For example to enable fail over for a store: