Document: draft-ietf-oauth-identity-chaining
Title: OAuth Identity and Authorization Chaining Across Domains
Reviewer: Phillip Hallam-Baker
Review result: Has Issues

This draft describes a mechanism for chaining OAUTH authorizations so that an
authorization server in trust domain A can provide a client with a token that
grants access to a resource in trust domain B.

While the draft mentions 'claims transcription' and the case where Jon Doe has
a different user identifier in another domain, it does not address the case in
which this mechanism is used for privacy protection by anonymizing access. This
should be addressed directly as it is likely to be one of the main use cases as
we discovered in SAML which is the foundation for Shiboleth which allows access
to resources across education campuses with privacy protections.

The security and privacy implications of this approach are significant and
should be addressed in the document directly. In particular, what expectations
has the client in this situation? In what ways might the identity of the
principal leak?

More generally, one impact of the ability to chain authorizations across
domains is to allow parties to partition systems into smaller domains and
establish separation of roles/duties.

Another question to be considered is the case in which the chaining is
recursive and whether there should be controls on the extent of the chaining
and if it is necessary to prevent loops.

It is easy to see how distribution of resources between trust domains A, B, C
could result in C referring back to A. This is certainly bad if the loop
continues forever but could be valid in certain situations. If for example
Trust domain A holds a resource but trust domain B has a veto on its release.
Unlike loops at the packet level which are always bad, the nature of the
request can change from hop to hop.


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