[OAUTH-WG] CORS and public vs. confidential clients

Bill Burke <bburke@redhat.com> Thu, 27 March 2014 15:53 UTC

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Date: Thu, 27 Mar 2014 11:30:15 -0400
From: Bill Burke <bburke@redhat.com>
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Subject: [OAUTH-WG] CORS and public vs. confidential clients
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I'm still trying to wrap my head around the differences between public 
and confidential clients.  In our IDP impl, we check redirect uris and 
associate a lot of private metadata to the access code to ensure there 
is no client_id swapping.  My understanding was that confidential 
clients made sure that only an authenticated client could obtain an 
access token.

What if you throw CORS in the mix where your browser needs the access 
token (and the ability to refresh it) to make cross-domain requests? 
Doesn't this remove a large benefit of confidential clients?

Anybody know a good document that describes the difference and pros/cons 
of public vs. confidential clients beyond the actual OAUTH spec itself?

Thanks

-- 
Bill Burke
JBoss, a division of Red Hat
http://bill.burkecentral.com