But in this scenario, the “audience” of the token is the resource server’s ID, 
right? And not the original client’s client id. This is a case where the RS is 
:also: a client, because of the token exchange bit, but you can’t say the 
audience is always going to be a client ID because most resource servers out 
there aren’t also going to be clients in their own right.

— Justin

On Mar 4, 2019, at 1:15 PM, Vittorio Bertocci 
<[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:

To add some color, here there's a concrete scenario where many of those 
concepts come together (or collide, if you prefer).
Azure AD implements am early draft of token exchange, largely for implementing 
a cloud friendly version of kerberos constrained delegation- say a native 
client calls a mid tier API, and the mid tier API turns around and calls a 
backend API flowing the identity of the user.
In order to do so, the mid-tier API performs a request to the authorization 
server asking for the scopes the backend API requires, and presenting as a 
grant the access token it received from the native client. The AS verifies that 
the resource owner previously granted consent (as there is no opportunity to 
show any UX). Here's the relevant part: the AS also verifies whether the 
audience in the access token (in whatever way it is expressed) corresponds to 
the client ID of the requestor, to prevent MITM attacks to gain an avenue for 
minting new tokens from arbitrarily captured ATs. In other words, the AS needs 
a mechanism to know that the resource indicator for the mid tier API and the 
client ID used by the app implementing that API to ask for new tokens are in 
fact pointing to the same entity.
The AS can always do this on its own, without relying on any standard guidance, 
and provide its own mechanism to associate API resource indicators with client 
IDs - but this scenario does suggest that it would be handy to be able to use 
the mid tier API clientID as an identifier in the request from the native 
client to get the bootstrap token.
I agree that doing so today is super confusing, as the developer would use 
something with "client" in its name to indicate a resource. To me this is a 
consequence of expressing everything in term of clients, which comes from the 
OAuth2 heritage of those flows, but doesn't provide a way of modeling the 
frequent occurrence in which an application legitimately plays both the 
resource (in the most general sense, including web sites) and the client role.

On Sun, Mar 3, 2019 at 6:17 PM Justin Richer 
<[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
There’s a difference in the intended audience of the access token in OAuth vs. 
the ID token in OpenID Connect. In OIDC, the ID token is read by the client, so 
the audience of the ID token is the client’s ID. That’s the only party reading 
that token, in the usual case. In OAuth, the access token goes to the protected 
resource (or the “API” as you say here). This resource could have an 
identifier, but it’s not *really* a client ID, since the resource isn’t a 
“client” in the OAuth sense. As Brian mentioned in his email, due to some 
unfortunate overlap in functionality, the resource server could be issued its 
own ID and secret, but these are really *resource* ID and not *client* ID, even 
though they use the “client_id” parameter for authentication. To confuse things 
even further, many implementations will store resource servers as “clients” 
with a special flag. It’s a matter of hindsight that we could have used an 
abstraction above these two things, some kind of “thing that calls the 
authorization server” of which instances would include resource servers and 
clients.

So in the end, the audience of an access token is not a client, and therefore 
this field isn’t a client ID. Additionally, the ID given to a resource server 
which could be used in either the “resource” and “audience” field isn’t a 
client ID either because the resource isn’t a client.

And finally, the “resource” identifier used in this parameter is something that 
has to be known to the client, so that the client can request it at runtime. A 
system is unlikely to publish a resource server’s internal identifier in this 
way, and will instead use a developer-facing name or a URL of some flavor.

Hope this clears things up, as much as it can be. I agree that between 
“resource”, “audience”, and “scope”, plus the UMA standard’s “permission” 
structure, things are more than a bit messy now.

— Justin

On Feb 27, 2019, at 2:46 AM, Jaap Francke 
<[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>
 wrote:

Hi all,

I have some questions/thoughts on the new draft for resource indicators.
I didn’t do an in-depth study but would like to share my thoughts with you 
anyway.

1. In this draft, the Resource is identified by ‘resource’ parameter. For 
example, when the resource is an API, I would expect that API to validate the 
access_token at the resource server. The protocol for this would be based on 
the API’s client_id, so from that angle using the the client_id could be a 
different way to indicate the intended recipient of the access token.

2. I also think that the ‘resource’ parameter would be closely related to the 
“aud” claim specified by the OpenID Connect specifications. I think it is 
getting more and more common to use the OIDC-protocol “on top of OAuth”, so I’m 
wondering how the resource parameter would relate to that. The values of the 
‘aud’ parameter are also client_id’s.

Thanks in advance for responding to my views.
Ciao!

Jaap Francke



On 26 Feb 2019, at 21:00, [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> 
wrote:

   draft-ietf-oauth-resource-indicators-02

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