The HTTP Working Group opened an issue for discussion in relation to the 
updated HTTP semantics specification. The core of the issue is the format of 
the “Authorization” header, which of course gets used by the “Bearer” scheme 
defined in RFC6750.

https://github.com/httpwg/http-core/issues/733 
<https://github.com/httpwg/http-core/issues/733>

As it turns out, Bearer defines a more limited character set than is allowed by 
core HTTP, and doesn’t follow the HTTP guidelines and definitions for the 
Authorization header. There were a few observations on the call:

 - The Bearer spec was limited because OAuth tokens were also allowed in HTTP 
URLs and form parameters (and therefore had to have a more limited character 
set)
 - In practice people don’t actually restrict the values they put into this 
field; pretty much any implementation is just going to concatenate whatever 
access token value they get to the magic word “Bearer” and send it
 - It’s not likely (or in my opinion proper) for the HTTP spec to change to 
address the oddities of RFC6750 and decisions that were made many years ago

So the question is, what do we do about it? We could do a revision of 6750 that 
reflects reality better, pretty much just changing the ABNF.

Or, we could update the definition of the Bearer header in the upcoming OAuth 
2.1 specification.

Are there other options?

 — Justin

_______________________________________________
OAuth mailing list
OAuth@ietf.org
https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/oauth

Reply via email to