Patent ID: 8074258

Claim:
At a client computer in a federated computerized system having the client, one or more identity providers, and one or more relying parties, a method of the client independently resolving the location of an identity provider pursuant to obtaining security tokens that can be used by the client to access one or more services at a relying party, comprising the acts of: the client computer contacting a relying party to access one or more services at the relying party; the client computer receiving one or more policy files from the relying party, wherein the one or more policy files comprise information that identifies a generalized name corresponding to a set of one or more trusted identity providers; the client computer automatically resolving the identified generalized name to obtain one or more network endpoints for one of the trusted identity providers; upon authenticating the one or more network endpoints, the client computer contacting the one resolved identity provider to obtain one or more digital identity representations for use in obtaining one or more security tokens and in response to the client computer at least sending one or more requests to the resolved identity provider to obtain information about any available digital identity representation provisioning service and the client computer receiving one or more messages comprising information about a digital identity representation provisioning service used with the resolved identity provider.