Re: [Ace] Review of draft-sengul-ace-mqtt-tls-profile-02

[Cigdem Sengul <[e-mail]>]

Hello Ludwig,

Again thank you for your comments.
We are going through them and making several revisions to our draft.

We want to discuss two of your comments further:

(1) Our text: ”and the client is authorized to obtain a token for the
indicated
   audience (e.g., topics) and scopes (e.g., publish/subscribe
   permissions)"

Your comment: Note that the audience claim is typically used to identify
the RS (so in this case the MQTT broker), while the scope is intended to
identify both the resource (=topic) and the actions (=publish, subscribe).
See this for how OAuth scopes are typically used:
https://www.brandur.org/oauth-scope

Our response:
According to the draft-IETF-ace-oauth-authz-12, the audience of an access
token can be a specific resource or one or many resource servers.

So, we considered three ways to structure our tokens, given that a token
can hold multiple scopes but only a single audience :
(1) aud: RS

     scopes: underscore separated keywords representing <permission>_<topic>,
e.g., "publish_valve2012/temperature", "subscribe_/foo/+/bar",
"subscribe_$SYS/#"
(2) aud: resource, i.e., a topic in MQTT context

      scopes: permissions, i.e., publish and/or subscribe keywords

(3) aud: permission, i.e., publish or subscribe
scope: topics (i.e., resources), e.g., topic1 topic2 topic3


We think Options (1) and (2)  fit the current text in the ace-oauth draft,
especially, when we consider this example:
{
     "grant_type" : "client_credentials",
     "client_id" : "myclient",
     "client_secret" : "mysecret234",
     "aud" : "valve424",
     "scope" : "read",
     "cnf" : {
       "kid" : b64'6kg0dXJM13U'
     }

If using option (1), we can choose to leave this as an "application
specific convention".  On the other hand, it could be useful to have
this defined, because MQTT only allows publish & subscribe, and there are
rules for the MQTT topic string.  This would make ACE-savvy MQTT clients &
servers generally more compatible/interoperable.

Based on our option (2), these would be in MQTT - “aud”: “valve424”,
“scope”: “subscribe” Note that, the multiple tokens trade-off we mention in
our draft still exists for the core’s valve example too. This token does
not help with reading “valve425”.


Option (3) is more left-field proposition and does not align with the rest
of the core draft. Though, it does have an efficiency advantage that a
single token can permit access to multiple topics.

Based on the ace-oauth draft, the first two options for token structure
should be acceptable. We want to list both to avoid being too prescriptive
about scope structures (as the option (1) dictates).

(2)

Your comment: An example of how the CONNECT message could look like would
be good.

We think we need a bit of clarification about what kind of an example you
have in mind. Our draft has a figure 2 that explains the different field an
MQTT Connect packet will have. We could add an example in hex (MQTT being
binary)  but it wouldn't be as easy to read as the HTTP example.

Thanks,
—Cigdem & Anthony