Plaintext JWSs haven't been free of controversy but the topic has been discussed many times and the [rough] consensus of the WG is that the "none" JWS alg is useful. It is in use by the finalized versions of OpenID Connect, as Vladimir has alluded to. And it has been fairly wildly deployed in production use.
The "Plaintext JWS Security Considerations" in section 8.5 of JWA [1] represents the consensus the WG came to, which keeps the "none" alg but mandates that implementations "MUST NOT accept such objects as valid unless the application specifies that it is acceptable for a specific object." [1] http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-jose-json-web-algorithms-25#section-8.5 Vladimir On Fri, Apr 25, 2014 at 2:51 PM, Kathleen Moriarty < [email protected]> wrote: > Thanks, Vladimir. > > Is there consensus in the WG that this is the right thing to do? I'm > expecting some push-back on this one and want to make sure it has > consensus behind it. I have heard of a couple of objections already. > > On Thu, Apr 17, 2014 at 2:10 PM, Vladimir Dzhuvinov > <[email protected]> wrote: > >> Thanks, Vladimir. > >> > >> How would they be secured then? With the current threat landscape, it > >> seems odd that we would be putting forth a method that is not secured? > >> Does this rely on transport for security? > > > > Yes, securing the JWS message with TLS for instance, as Mike just > > pointed > > out in the his response. > > > > JWT-encoded ID tokens in OpenID Connect is one such example, but only > > when > > the token is returned from the OAuth 2.0 token endpoint where TLS is > > mandatory, clients can then register to receive plaintext ID tokens: > > > > http://openid.net/specs/openid-connect-core-1_0.html#IDToken > > > > > > There is a section in the JWA spec to instruct developers of the various > > security > > considerations regarding use of "none" alg JWS: > > > > > http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-jose-json-web-algorithms-25#section-8.5 > > > > > > Vladimir > > > > > > > >> On Thu, Apr 17, 2014 at 12:57 PM, Vladimir Dzhuvinov < > >> [email protected]> wrote: > >> > >> > Hi Kathleen, > >> > > >> > > >> > > Section 3.6 - Can you explain why would this be included? If you > are > >> > not going to sign, I am not sure why one would use JOSE at all. > >> > > > >> > > >> > Perhaps the most popular application of JWS today is to construct JSON > >> > Web Tokens (JWT), such as the ID tokens in OpenID Connect. The JWT > spec > >> > permits plain tokens that don't have a signature and this is enabled > by > >> > the special case "none" alg in JWS. > >> > > >> > Plaintext JWTs are explained here: > >> > > >> > > http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-oauth-json-web-token-19#section-6 > >> > > >> > > >> > Vladimir > >> > > >> > > >> > >> > >> -- > >> > >> Best regards, > >> Kathleen > > > > -- > > Best regards, > Kathleen > > _______________________________________________ > jose mailing list > [email protected] > https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/jose >
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