My inclination for unstructured tokens is the size (20-30 bytes).  I have some 
edge cases where my wireless bandwidth drops down to pathetically anemic rates, 
and every byte counts.  Even the smallest JWT token that I was able to come up 
with (containing relevant material) was around 478 bytes.  Of course if I had a 
JWT, then I might not even need to do the introspection at all.  This would be 
interesting.  In fact ... I originally started down a JWT path, but found OAuth 
implementation that could return a structured JWT access-token to be scarce.  I 
could be misinformed though.

-adam

From: George Fletcher [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Friday, June 01, 2012 2:34 PM
To: Lewis Adam-CAL022
Cc: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [OAUTH-WG] Inter-domain AS/RS communication (revisited)

I'm not sure why the dependency on the "unstructured token". You can have a 
small "structured" token which provides some additional capabilities.

That said, as long as the RS can determine "which" AS the token came from, this 
solutions works well. I believe a few other implementations use a similar 
solution. I consider this definitely within the spirit of OAuth:)

We chose to use structured tokens (JWS) which allowed us to specify the URL of 
the AS as well as a user identifier and some other data.

Thanks,
George

On 6/1/12 9:59 AM, Lewis Adam-CAL022 wrote:
Hi all,

I've asked about the lack of standardization of the AS-RS interface in the 
past, but I have a new twist on my question.  What is the viability of 
performing user "authentication" using OAuth with an RS in domain-1, and a 
whole bunch of AS's in different domains (assuming that the RS and AS is of the 
same implementation)?

            RS (domain-1)

AS-1     AS-2     AS-3     AS-4     AS-5     AS-6     AS-n

Let me explain a bit further.  I have a RS in domain-1 which exposes an API, 
which is accessed by a native client, with users from (for example) 12 
different domains.  (Note: both the RS and native clients are of the same 
vendor implementation).  Each of the 12 user domains has an AS, of the same 
implementation as the RS in domain-1.  I'm thinking that native client users 
from domain X should be able to authenticate to the AS in their home domain 
using some primary authentication means, obtain an unstructured access-token, 
and present that access-token to the RS in domain-1.  Because they are all of 
the same implementation, the RS in domain-1 should be able to make a RESTful 
API call to the AS in domain X to obtain a JSON structure, containing among 
other things, the user's name, and possibly other attributes.  Hence secondary 
authentication has been realized.

This seems to work, but is this within the spirit of OAuth, or have I gone off 
into LaLa land?  We have looked at using the SAML bearer assertion profile for 
OAuth, but we do a lot over wireless links, many of which are bandwidth anemic, 
and the overhead of obtaining the SAML assertion and sending it are making me a 
bit squeamish.  OAuth is attractive because of its light weight-ness.  Is the 
usage I'm proposing of OAuth (above) something that would be within the overall 
spirit of the OAuth framework?

Tx!
adam




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