Re: [OAUTH-WG] OAuth 1 Bridge Flow

Justin Richer <jricher@mitre.org> Tue, 04 May 2010 18:56 UTC

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From: Justin Richer <jricher@mitre.org>
To: Marius Scurtescu <mscurtescu@google.com>
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Date: Tue, 04 May 2010 14:46:36 -0400
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Cc: OAuth WG <oauth@ietf.org>
Subject: Re: [OAUTH-WG] OAuth 1 Bridge Flow
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Interesting work. So as each app upgrades its support from OAuth1 to
OAuth2, it exchanges its old tokens for new ones once for each user,
right? Then the app in question is effectively going to have to speak
both flavors of OAuth to do this one-time upgrade. I always assumed that
apps would just have to get new OAuth2 access tokens by going back to
the user (since tokens are cheap), but I can definitely see value in
there being a clean upgrade path, especially for wide deployments. 

Because the other side of things, what would it take an implementor to
have a backwards-compatible system? Since the OAuth2 protocol is by
design not backwards compatible (though the signature-based web flows
are all the same spirit as 1.0a, all the parameter names are different),
I'm thinking that one would need either parallel endpoints or a proxy of
some kind that works almost like that which was proposed here, but on an
ongoing basis. 

 -- Justin

On Tue, 2010-05-04 at 13:26 -0400, Marius Scurtescu wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I would like to suggest a flow, or endpoint, that is bridging OAuth 1
> and OAuth 2. See the attachment.
> 
> The OAuth 1 Bridge Flow basically defines an endpoint where you can
> place a signed OAuth 1 request and in response you receive a short
> lived OAuth 2.0 access token. This flow can be used by clients that
> have a long lived OAuth 1.0 access token and want to use a short lived
> OAuth 2.0 access token to access protected resources.
> 
> Do you have a use case for a flow like this? If not exactly but close,
> how can the flow be improved to cover your use case as well?
> 
> Feedback more than welcome.
> 
> Thanks,
> Marius