[OAUTH-WG] Subject: Re: Usage of Password Grant

[Francis Pouatcha <[e-mail]>]

Hi Aaron,

>
>
> Hi Beena,
>
> This sounds like a great use of the client credentials grant. The password
> grant is being removed from OAuth 2.0 by the Security Best Current
> Practice. Can you clarify what you've found useful about the password grant
> that the client credentials grant doesn't solve?
>
Beena could use the Dynamic Client Registration to have all those devices
registered as oAuth Clients. But this seems to be inconvenient as he
describes.

In the password grant flow, the device holds the password and is not
involved in any interaction with the AS. This keeps the device use case
simple.


>
> Aaron Parecki
>
>
> On Sun, May 10, 2020 at 3:18 AM Beena Santhosh <
> [e-mail]>
> wrote:
>
> > Hi,
> >
> >
> > We have a product with client server architecture where our server
> manages
> > thousands of devices. Each device has a client-piece that talks to the
> > server over SOAP/REST. The client currently uses a HTTP Basic
> > Authentication (unique id and a secret string) for all the calls. The
> > secret string is created when the device enrolls to the server. It is
> > available at the server as well as stored securely on the device. For the
> > rest calls it is the device that is getting authenticated.
> >
> >
> >
> >  Sending the credentials every time is less than ideal and we want to
> move
> > to some tokenized device authentication. We evaluated OpendID Connect
> based
> > on the general recommendation of SSO solution, but the issue is we do not
> > have any user interaction and hence there is no Grant flow that is
> fitting.
> > Hence we evaluated OAuth grant type of which we found Password Grant and
> > Client Credentials Grant is matching our requirement.
> >
> >
> >
> >  In order to use Client Credentials in our use case, we need to do
> dynamic
> > registration for the thousands of devices managed by the server, if IoT
> > comes into picture the number is going to be even higher, which is highly
> > cumbersome to manage.  Also, as per  RFC7591 on dynamic client
> > registration, using access token for registering client is optional too.
> > Even though the Password grant is highly discouraged by the spec, we
> found
> > it to be highly matching with our requirements.
> >
> >
> >
> > But as per the Oauth 2.1 proposal, password grant is going to be
> removed. Can
> > you suggest the way forward for us? I believe we are not a one-off case.
> >
> >
> > Thank You,
> >
> > Beena
> > _______________________________________________
> > OAuth mailing list
> > [e-mail]
> > https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/oauth
> >
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-- 
Francis Pouatcha
Co-Founder and Technical Lead at adorys
https://adorsys-platform.de/solutions/