Thanks George for the super thorough review and feedback!
Inline
> Section 1. Introduction
��� second line: scenario should be plural --> scenarios
��� second sentence: "are not ran by" --> "are not run by"
�� cofidentiality --> confidentiality
Fixed. Thanks!
> Section 2.2.1 Authentication Information Claims
��� I'm not sure that this definition of `auth_time` allows for the
case where a user is required to solve an additional challenge.
If the challenge entails going back to the AS, then I believe the language (in
the initial paragraph of 2.2.1 and in auth_time itself) accommodates for that
and does require the auth_time to be updated.
If you hit the AS and present an authentication factor (such as your challenge)
and obtain a new token in the process, the auth_time will reflect the time of
your latest authentication just like an id_token would in the same
circumstances (think protected route in a web app requiring step up auth) and
(likely) associated session artifacts (think RTs or cookies with sliding
expiration, the challenge would count as activity and move the expiration).
> ��� I think there is a difference between session_start_time and
> last
auth_time. This feels more like it's defining the session_start_time
concept.
> �� These same issues can apply to the `acr` and `amr` values as well.
Per the above, the intent is more to express the last time the user performed
any authentication action rather than the start time. The intent is to provide
information as current as possible, as it might be relevant to the RS decisions
whereas the history before current conditions might not be consequential.
> �� Even if for this secondary challenge a new refresh_token is
issued,
it is unlikely many relying parties will want to treat that as issuing a
new session. The goal is to keep the user logged in to a single session.
Could you expand on the practical implications of the above? The intent isn't
as much to reflect session identifying information per se, but to provide the
RS with the most up to date information about the circumstances in which the
current AT was obtained. The fact that a session was initially established
using acr level 0 doesn’t really matter if the AT I am receiving now has been
obtained after a stepup that brought acr to 1, if my RS cares auth
authentication levels my authorization decision shouldn't be influenced by
whether somewhere the session artifact didn’t change its sessionID after the
stepup. Same for acr, auth_time
> Section 2.2.3 Authorization Claims
�� I find the statement "All the individual scope strings in the scope
claim MUST have meaning for the resource indicated in the aud claim"
somewhat problematic. In many deployments today for 1st party clients to
the authorization server and taking into account mobile applications,
the access token most like contains scopes for many of the 1st party
backend APIs. It's possible to get around this by setting the 'aud'
claim to something like "com.example.apis" and hence all the issued
scopes map to that audience claim but that is just working around the
MUST in the spec. Given the lack of specificity of the 'aud' claim and
the 'resource indicator' claim for that matter, pretty much anything can
be made to comply. In that context, it seems like RECOMMEND is a better
normative clause.
For 1st party solutions, I would argue that delegation might not be the right
primitive hence I wouldn't necessarily use scopes to express permissions; but
that's a rabbit hole I'll try to avoid for the time being __
For the aud, I think that what you characterized as workaround would actually
be by design. The aud defines the applicability of the current token, so that
in case of leakage the blast radius of the incident can be contained. If the
solution designed decides that this particular token should be reusable across
multiple assets, I think it makes sense for the aud to reflect that explicitly.
That's the system designing volunteering a scope xpansion of the scope, and
given that it has security implications I think it's good to require it to be
an explicit, opt in action. At the same time, given that scopes are often used
to define permissions, I believe it makes sense to find mechanisms to minimize
the chance that RSes would misinterpret the applicability of a scope (see
discussion with Takahiko/Nikos). Summing all the above, I'd be inclined to keep
the MUST.
> Section 3. Requesting a JWT Access Token
�� Per my comments above I suspect that requiring all JWT access
tokens
to include an audience claim will just devolve to audience claims that
are somewhat pointless (in order to meet this MUST in the spec). Given
the mobile app environment today, it is unreasonable to ask the mobile
apps to downscope every access token before making an API call to the
backend APIs which is what the spirit of audience and resource
indicators seem to imply.
Partly addressed in the preceding point, but this is a great opportunity to
clarify the intent further. The mobile client isn't required to downscope;
rather, the fact that a token cab be applied to a broad range of API should be
clearly identified and expressed by the logical audience. The system designer
can even choose to have a single token that can be used to call any API,
containing every scope for every API; the profile only asks for this choice to
be manifest, by choosing an appropriate audience identifier and acknowledging
that all the scopes in the token are applicable to the same logical resource
(that is, the aggregate of all the APIs).
> �� Why MUST the AS reject a request with more than one resource
parameter? If a request comes in with no resource parameter and multiple
scopes the AS is not required to reject that request. Is there much of a
semantic difference between the two? In the case of no resource
parameter and multiple scopes the AS might issue an access token with
multiple audience values (as is allowed by RFC 7519).
This is another consequence of making extra clear what the token refers to, and
what the intended semantic of the scopes is. The idea is that the token is
always restricted to ONE specific audience. The profile allows for different
mechanisms for the AS to determine what value the audience should be, including
via inference from scopes, but coherently with the scope confusion prevention
principle, if that inference cannot lead to a single resource identifier in the
audience, the request should be rejected.
The intent is really to be as simple as unambiguous as possible, and capture
what most mainstream providers already do in JWT ATs. If a RS has more
sophisticated requirements, they can always decide to do more and not follow
the interop profile. Defining more complex rules to prevent scope/resource
association confusion simply doesn’t seem to be justified by the frequency of
the scenario in the wild.
> Also, the audience
claim is not solely for resource indicator values but is defined to just
be a string. To me it feels like the text is implying that the only
valid audience value is also a resource indicator (which from previous
discussions on the list it was implied they have a slightly different
semantic).
Section 3 of the profile does define aud as a resource indicator, enumerating
an exhaustive list of possible requests that all end in a resource indicator as
aud, or an error. Did I miss some cases? I don’t recall specifics about aud
values in this profile having other possible values, sorry for having missed
that. Do you have a snippet referring to those discussions? Thx
> �� The model described here works well if myco.example really only
provides a single service. But if instead myco.example provides multiple
services each with their own endpoints (srva.myco.example,
srvb.myco.example) and scopes, for me this model begins to break down.
Either mobile apps are required to downscope all tokens to just the
service they are calling at that point in time (which can have latency
and connectivity issues), or myco.example has to create a generic
"audience" string that represents all of example.com which doesn't seem
to be the spirit of the existing specs.
I think that the granularity of the calls is fully within the control of the
designer. If srva.myco.example and srvb.myco.example share analogous
characteristics (same policies, lifecycle, resource ownership, etc) them it's
perfectly valid to assign a logical myco.example audience encompassing them
all, regardless of deployment model. If there are differences in terms of
policies, auth strength requirements, lifecycle, risk and impact of a leak, or
any other boundary, then the audience requirement will guarantee that those
differences are reflected in tokens requested and cached, in the way in which
access is partitioned, and so on and so forth. If there are security
requirements such as the ones enumerated, the latency and connectivity issues
aren’t a blocking factor; and if there aren't, nothing prevents you from having
a logical audience value. From the expressive power point of view, the
requirement of having a single audience doens't prevent you from doing any of
the single token logic you are hinting at- especially if you plan to use
specialized scopes anyway.
> �� In summary, I feel that this text is binding too tightly resource
indicators to the audience claim. What is described is perfectly
reasonable in a use case that is applying resource indicators in this
way but is not indicative of the widely deployed models that already exist.
We might have different experiences here. The JWT access tokens from popular
products I studied in the research I presented in Stuttgart were almost all
using the aud claim in this way. I am sure that there are other models, and
there was at least one exception, but in interop terms this seems to be the
most common way of using JWT for ATs- and it has the advantage of being very
simple and unambiguous.
> Section 4. Validating JWT Access Tokens
�� Step 4. -- Can we change the wording to not require resource
indicators? What about... "The resource server MUST validate that the
'aud' claim contains a string that represents the audience of this
resource server."
Could you make an example in which you'd want to use an identifier that is not
a resource indicator? Given that we have the spec, and "audience of the
resource server" seems to be the exact semantic of resource indicators, it
seemed a slam dunk to use it here...
> Section 5. "cross-JWT confusion"
�� I think there may be confusion around what is meant by "distinct
resources". In my example above, are srva.myco.example and
srvb.myco.example "distinct resources"? or is the goal here to say that
we want different audience values generated for cross-organization
resources. For example, are mail.google.com and youtube.com "distinct
resources"? or would an audience for google suffice in meeting the
meaning of this paragraph?
I think the key point here is - we don’t know. I agree the language isn't clear
there. Let me expand on the intent, and perhaps we can get to a better
formulation.
OAuth2 doesn’t demand that RS and AS are run by the same entity, but that's the
most common scenario. FB doesn't need to specify a resource, because the
resource is implicit.. it's the FB graph, you can’t get a token for anything
else. The only differentiator ends up being the scopes. Same for many other
providers, google, Microsoft for its own Graph, etc.
However many AS as a service don’t have the benefit of a default, implicit
resource, especially in multi tenancy scenarios, given that they'll need to
issue tokens for a number of different recipients. Whether resources are cross
organization, or cross department, or following any other arbitrary
segregation/factoring model is something we cannot infer- it's up to the
developer to determine that. What I am trying to express here is that the
operator of the AS as a service (or any other form of "AS for rent") should
surface resources as a primitive for modeling and identifying intended
recipients of ATs. Does tis help? How would you express that?
> � I'm having the same confusion in the next paragraph regarding the
phrase "different resources". Are services provided by the same company
"different resources" or are they all considered the same resource. Can
an access token be issued with scopes for both mail.google.com and
youtube.com? And if not, why note? Preventing this puts undue burden on
mobile based applications.
See preceding point. We can't enter in the merit of what constitutes a
resource, as that depends on the modeling of the domain specific problem the
developer is tackling. The highest order bit is that if two entities (API,
etc.. intended token recipients) have different security characteristics (e.g.
leaking a token for one has different consequences than if you'd leak a token
for the other), they should be modeled as different resources. And if they are
different resources, we should do what we can to avoid confusion in how we
express access grants to them (hence the big discussion on multiresource, scope
confusion, etc).
---------
On 3/24/20, 10:39, "George Fletcher" <gffle...@aol.com> wrote:
Feedback on the spec...
Section 1. Introduction
��� second line: scenario should be plural --> scenarios
��� second sentence: "are not ran by" --> "are not run by"
Section 2.2.1 Authentication Information Claims
��� I'm not sure that this definition of `auth_time` allows for the
case where a user is required to solve an additional challenge. Take the
case of a user who is required to pass a secondary challenge before the
"stock purchase" action can be completed. According to the current spec
definition, the `auth_time` value MUST NOT be updated when this
secondary challenge is completed.
��� I think there is a difference between session_start_time and
last
auth_time. This feels more like it's defining the session_start_time
concept.
�� These same issues can apply to the `acr` and `amr` values as well.
�� Even if for this secondary challenge a new refresh_token is issued,
it is unlikely many relying parties will want to treat that as issuing a
new session. The goal is to keep the user logged in to a single session.
Section 2.2.3 Authorization Claims
�� I find the statement "All the individual scope strings in the scope
claim MUST have meaning for the resource indicated in the aud claim"
somewhat problematic. In many deployments today for 1st party clients to
the authorization server and taking into account mobile applications,
the access token most like contains scopes for many of the 1st party
backend APIs. It's possible to get around this by setting the 'aud'
claim to something like "com.example.apis" and hence all the issued
scopes map to that audience claim but that is just working around the
MUST in the spec. Given the lack of specificity of the 'aud' claim and
the 'resource indicator' claim for that matter, pretty much anything can
be made to comply. In that context, it seems like RECOMMEND is a better
normative clause.
Section 3. Requesting a JWT Access Token
�� Per my comments above I suspect that requiring all JWT access
tokens
to include an audience claim will just devolve to audience claims that
are somewhat pointless (in order to meet this MUST in the spec). Given
the mobile app environment today, it is unreasonable to ask the mobile
apps to downscope every access token before making an API call to the
backend APIs which is what the spirit of audience and resource
indicators seem to imply.
�� Why MUST the AS reject a request with more than one resource
parameter? If a request comes in with no resource parameter and multiple
scopes the AS is not required to reject that request. Is there much of a
semantic difference between the two? In the case of no resource
parameter and multiple scopes the AS might issue an access token with
multiple audience values (as is allowed by RFC 7519). Also, the audience
claim is not solely for resource indicator values but is defined to just
be a string. To me it feels like the text is implying that the only
valid audience value is also a resource indicator (which from previous
discussions on the list it was implied they have a slightly different
semantic).
�� The model described here works well if myco.example really only
provides a single service. But if instead myco.example provides multiple
services each with their own endpoints (srva.myco.example,
srvb.myco.example) and scopes, for me this model begins to break down.
Either mobile apps are required to downscope all tokens to just the
service they are calling at that point in time (which can have latency
and connectivity issues), or myco.example has to create a generic
"audience" string that represents all of example.com which doesn't seem
to be the spirit of the existing specs.
�� In summary, I feel that this text is binding too tightly resource
indicators to the audience claim. What is described is perfectly
reasonable in a use case that is applying resource indicators in this
way but is not indicative of the widely deployed models that already exist.
Section 4. Validating JWT Access Tokens
�� Step 4. -- Can we change the wording to not require resource
indicators? What about... "The resource server MUST validate that the
'aud' claim contains a string that represents the audience of this
resource server."
Section 5. "cross-JWT confusion"
�� I think there may be confusion around what is meant by "distinct
resources". In my example above, are srva.myco.example and
srvb.myco.example "distinct resources"? or is the goal here to say that
we want different audience values generated for cross-organization
resources. For example, are mail.google.com and youtube.com "distinct
resources"? or would an audience for google suffice in meeting the
meaning of this paragraph?
� I'm having the same confusion in the next paragraph regarding the
phrase "different resources". Are services provided by the same company
"different resources" or are they all considered the same resource. Can
an access token be issued with scopes for both mail.google.com and
youtube.com? And if not, why note? Preventing this puts undue burden on
mobile based applications.
Section 6. Privacy
�� cofidentiality --> confidentiality
Thanks,
George
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