Hi Ron, Your gateway case makes the ownership question concrete. I would separate who asserts that the decomposition satisfies the owner’s goal from who authorizes each RS’s actual operation.
A useful test could be a purchase where one RS reserves product A and another charges for product B. Each local operation may be permitted, and both may carry the same goal ID, without jointly satisfying the intended purchase. The goal ID alone cannot establish that correspondence. The RSs need not share a policy language, but whichever party claims goal satisfaction needs enough authenticated, typed information to make that comparison. Your use case could help the design team state that obligation without prematurely prescribing a new cross-service evaluator. I’d be glad to help turn it into a small positive/negative case alongside the exact-action case I mentioned. Best, Iman On Tue, 29 Sep 2026 16:08:36 -0700, Ron Bartor <[email protected]> wrote: Hi Dapeng, all, I support continuing this direction and would like to contribute to the design team. I wasn't in the room at 126, so apologies if this was covered, but I'd like to put one scenario on the table for the "goal state management" and "discoverable schema" pillars. I operate an enterprise API gateway that fronts MCP and agent traffic. A single agent request routinely fans out to several downstream resource servers, and each of those RSs owns its own authorization semantics: its own notion of what a task is, what the constraining attributes are, and how a request is scoped. Those semantics are not shared across services, and in some cases cannot be. A concrete example is an RS that was integrated from a separate business unit; its authorization model reflects its own history and is materially different from the rest of our services, and harmonizing it is neither quick nor, for some of its consumers, desirable. In that setting, per-RS schema discovery (as in draft-zehavi-oauth-rar-metadata) solves the local problem but not the cross-RS one: the goal has to be carried across trust domains that are mutually opaque, and something has to decide whether each downstream task is still within the goal without any RS seeing the others' vocabulary. The slides put "task in goal" evaluation out of scope, which I understand, but I think the design team should at least be explicit about where that evaluation lives in a multi-RS decomposition (client, AS, gateway/intermediary, or each RS independently) and what the goal-state representation needs to look like so that it remains meaningful to an RS that only understands its own schema. I'd be glad to write this up as a concrete use case, and I think it fits naturally with the RS-to-client signaling work already in the WG (txn-challenge, client-challenge, RAR-metadata) rather than requiring new machinery. Best regards, Ron Bar-Tor On Tue, Sep 29, 2026 at 3:13 PM Iman Schrock <team= [email protected]> wrote: > Hi Dapeng, > > I support continuing this work. One boundary I would like the design team > to test: a goal-level authorization can help a client negotiate what an RS > requires, but it is not approval of the eventual exact action. A changed > payment destination after negotiation, or a lost response after provider > entry, needs its own decision and recovery rule. > > We have published AEB > <https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-schrock-action-evidence-boundary/> > and an open vector pack > < https://github.com/emiliaprotocol/emilia-protocol/tree/main/conformance/aeb-1> > for that boundary. I would be glad to bring a small cross-system case to > the design team and see where it belongs alongside existing OAuth work. > > Best, > Iman > > > On Wed, 30 Sep 2026 00:19:52 +0800, "刘大鹏(鹏成)" <max.ldp= > [email protected]> wrote: > > Hello all, During IETF 126 we had a discussion on how OAuth can support > fine-grained authorization for AI agents [1]. The topic generated a lot of > interest in the room, and the poll showed support for continuing the > discussion [2]. A quick summary of the problem space as presented in the > session [3]: 1. Enabling clients to construct fine-grained authorization > requests using: a. Goal state management, b. Discoverable domain-specific > schemas for task and authorization definition, c. Task-in-goal evaluation > requests 2. Establishing a negotiation pattern that allows a resource > server to guide clients towards the required authorization The session also > proposed forming a design team to explore this space [3]. Before IETF 127, > we would like to hear from the WG: - Is this a direction the community is > interested in pursuing? Replies on the list will help shape the discussion > at IETF 127. [1] > https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/126/materials/minutes-126-oauth-202607240700-00 > [2] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/polls-126-oauth-202607240900/ [3] > https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/126/materials/slides-126-oauth-sessb-policy-language-binding-for-oauth-00 > Best regards,Dapeng Liu > > _______________________________________________ > OAuth mailing list -- [email protected] > To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected] >
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