Agreed with Eran. GET parameters certainly make exploring APIs easier.

On Thu, Apr 8, 2010 at 7:31 AM, Eran Hammer-Lahav <[email protected]> wrote:
> While I agree that the spec would be much cleaner with only HTTP header
> support, and have tried that approach before, in practice it will cause
> significant adoption problems.
>
> I rather add support for query and post parameters (we are really talking
> about a single parameter, oauth_token, outside the HTTP header), and in a
> few year deprecate it in OAuth 3.0. The benefit of these features is that
> they allow existing browsers to deploy OAuth *today*.
>
> As for the document structure, it is too early to tell. With OAuth 1.0a I
> ended shuffling the sections in draft -09... The spec has to tell a story.
>
> EHL
>
>
> On 4/8/10 1:54 AM, "Torsten Lodderstedt" <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> Hi Eran,
>>
>> since you are re-working sections 5-7 now, I want to address some
>> general issues I see there.
>>
>> - What is the benefit of including "URI Query Parameter" and
>> "Form-Encoded Body Parameter" in the standard? I see OAuth as an HTTP
>> authentication scheme similar to BASIC or SPNEGO. All of these schemes
>> exclusively use Authorization headers for sending credentials from
>> clients to servers. That way, authorization is kept orthogonal from
>> the servers API.
>> Advantages:
>> + APIs can be combined with different authentication schemes
>> + Libraries can be plugged in and easily add authorization data
>> + no name clashes with API parameters
>> + can be combined with any HTTP method
>>
>> It's ok with me if someone wants to send tokens as Query/Body
>> Parameters. But then the token parameter becomes a part of the
>> resource servers API. Why standardizing that?
>>
>>  From a security standpoint, sending tokens as query parameter is
>> problematic since their are many ways to leak them. Servers typically
>> log target URLs in default configurations, GET request URLs are stored
>> in browser caches and proxies. And what about Referer-Headers?
>>
>> When we adopted OAuth 1.0a, the fact that OAuth 1.0a supported three
>> different ways of sending tokens caused a lot of confusion. What type
>> is supported by what resource server? Do we need to support all of
>> them or a sub set? e.t.c.
>>
>> So IMHO removing 5.1.2 and 5.1.3 would make the standard much simpler
>> and easier to understand/implement/use.
>>
>> Moreover, it should save at least 2 pages.
>>
>> - I would like to suggest to change section ordering (5-7) in order to
>> facilitate readability. From my point of view, the major contribution
>> of the OAuth HTTP authentication scheme is the definition of the
>> Authorization headers syntax (and semantics). Why not putting this in
>> front? Further on, the natural counter part of the Authorization
>> header is the WWW-Authenticate header since it is used to advertise
>> important properties of the authentication scheme to clients. So I
>> would suggest to describe it afterwards.
>>
>> Based on this considerations, I would suggest the following structure
>> (just a sketch):
>>
>> 4 (was 7) Authorization Header
>>   description of both variants
>>    token only
>>    token + signature
>>   5.2.1 Computing the signature
>>   security considerations
>>    e.g. implementations MUST support bearer tokens w/ HTTPS, resource
>> servers and clients SHOULD use it
>> 5 (was 6) WWW-Authenticate Header
>>
>> I'm willed to contribute a more elaborated proposal if you and the WG
>> agree with the direction I proposed.
>>
>> What do you think?
>>
>> regards,
>> Torsten.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
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