Hi Zachary,

Your assumption below is correct.

The use case is as follows:  We have OAuth clients (both native and 
confidential) the our users log into in order to access resources hosted by a 
high-assurance RS.  The assurance requirements of this RS requires that the end 
user who authenticated to the AS in order to enable the client with an access 
token is still actively logged onto the client.

The enablement of this is exactly as you describe.  The RESTful API between the 
client and RS enables the RS to instruct the client that its access token is 
now "stale" and no longer valid for accessing its protected resources.  At this 
point the client can redirect the end user back to the RS to re-authenticate, 
but the issue is that if the session with the AS is still valid, it will 
authenticate the end-user via a session cookie and not ask for primary 
credentials again.  So it would be nice to have a prompt-like parameter that 
would cause the AS to re-authenticate the end user via primary authentication.

I do realize (as Justin pointed out) that OAuth access tokens are designed to 
be usable even when the end user is not logged onto the client, but my use case 
(being higher assurance) explicitly requires that the user MUST be logged onto 
the client in order for the client to use the ATs.

-adam

From: Zeltsan, Zachary (Zachary) [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Friday, September 14, 2012 10:21 AM
To: Lewis Adam-CAL022; [email protected]
Subject: Re: [OAUTH-WG] prompt parameter for Authorization Request

Adam,

In your use case, how does AS request user re-authentication?
In OAuth the user agent is redirected back to the Client after the user has 
authorized the client.
The AS is a web server and cannot initiate a call to the user agent. I assume 
that the request to re-authenticate comes in a response from RS to the Client, 
and then the Client in a response to the user agent re-directs the user agent 
back to the AS for another round of authentication and authorization. Is this 
correct?
I would like to learn more about your use case. Do you have a pointer to a 
description?

Zachary


-------- Original Message --------
Subject:

[OAUTH-WG] prompt parameter for Authorization Request

Date:

Thu, 13 Sep 2012 20:36:13 +0000

From:

Lewis Adam-CAL022 
<[email protected]><mailto:[email protected]>

To:

[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> <[email protected]><mailto:[email protected]>



Hi,

OpenID Connect defines a parameter for the Authorization Request that I really 
like a lot, the prompt parameter which can force the AS to re-challenge the 
user for primary authentication.

This would be a nice feature to have for OAuth too.

I have some high assurance use cases where my resource servers will require a 
certain "freshness" of the access token.  The RS will only accept a AT within a 
certain lifetime (say for example 1hr).  If a client presents an AT to the RS 
that was minted over 1hr ago, the RS (via its RESTful API) will return an error 
message indicating such to the client.  Further, the RS requires explicit 
re-authentication of the end user (by the AS) to obtain a new token.

However, if the UA still has an active session with the AS, the AS will not 
know to re-prompt for primary auth.

Hence having a PROMPT parameter in OAuth would be ideal.

Obviously, the train has left the station in terms of the core draft.  But I'm 
wondering if anybody else has come across such use cases before?


Tx
adam




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