To validate a new installation of ADFS, we created a small sample app that used Windows Identity Foundation to authenticate to the ADFS server.
We got most information from our system administrator, but it turned out that the Issuer Thumbprint was missing.
As the system administrator wasn’t in the office, we had to find a different solution to get the thumbprint.
Here is what we did:
- By default every ADFS server exposes its metadata through a metadata xml. Typically the url where you can find this metadata xml will be something like
- Inside this XML you can find the signing and encryption certificates:
https://adfs4.sample.be/federationmetadata/2007-06/federationmetadata.xml
- To read out the certificate information(and the thumbprint) you have to
- Create a new text file
- Copy the certificate value into the file
- Save the file with a .cer extension
- Now you can open the file, and read out the thumbprint value:
- Double click on the file
- Go to the Details tab
- Scroll to the thumbprint property