Re: [OAUTH-WG] Second WGLC on "JSON Web Token (JWT) Profile for OAuth 2.0 Access Tokens"

vittorio.bertocci@auth0.com Mon, 20 April 2020 08:11 UTC

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From: vittorio.bertocci@auth0.com
To: 'David Waite' <david=40alkaline-solutions.com@dmarc.ietf.org>, 'Vladimir Dzhuvinov' <vladimir@connect2id.com>, 'Dominick Baier' <dbaier@leastprivilege.com>
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Date: Mon, 20 Apr 2020 01:10:58 -0700
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Subject: Re: [OAUTH-WG] Second WGLC on "JSON Web Token (JWT) Profile for OAuth 2.0 Access Tokens"
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Thanks guys for the commentary here.

I wasn’t too partial on the “time claim” type. I just went for “Iat” very much in line with Vladimir’s guess, it was quite empirical: 

*	it comes from OIDC, and for the usual consideration that existing logic used for processing ID_tokens will be partially repurposed to implement some of the validation steps
*	“nbf” appeared as the “time claim” only in AzureAD and IS, while “iat” appears in AWS, OKTA, Auth0 and again Azure AD, hence it seemed the common choice

The slightly more philosophical, but still empirical reason is that I haven’t observed scenarios in which the RS defers to the AS the decision about the starting time for the validity of the AT, the semantic of “nbf”, whereas “iat” simply states a fact about the token and it’s up to the RS to decide what to do with it, including applying nbf sematic. That’s a decision that can be easily enshrined as a default in an SDK without loss of expressive power.

 

I am not married to “iat” and if there’s strong momentum for “nbf” I am open to change it, however we are in a second last call and we just discussed “iat” in the interim meeting last week, hence I thought we had pretty strong consensus on “iat” already. You folks tell me 😊

 

From: OAuth <oauth-bounces@ietf.org> On Behalf Of David Waite
Sent: Sunday, April 19, 2020 10:00 PM
To: Vladimir Dzhuvinov <vladimir@connect2id.com>
Cc: oauth@ietf.org
Subject: Re: [OAUTH-WG] Second WGLC on "JSON Web Token (JWT) Profile for OAuth 2.0 Access Tokens"

 

There are a number of ambiguities and statements around using JWTs in various contexts:

 

1. Some implementations interpret “iat" to also have the meaning of “nbf” in the absence of “nbf”, although this is AFAIK not prescribed by any spec

2. The DPoP draft’s client-generated tokens have the resource servers use their own nbf/exp heuristics around “iat”, since the tokens are meant for immediate one time use by a party that may not have clock synchronization.

3. There are recommendations in the JWT profile for OAuth that the AS may reject tokens based on an “iat” too far in the past or “exp” too far in the future, but not that “nbf” was too far in the past or that the interval between nbf and exp was too large.

 

The JWT spec also allows implementers to provide some leeway for clock skew. Presumably this meant validators and not JWT creators, although there is history of messages setting similar values to account for clock skew (e.g. SAML IDPs setting notBefore to one minute before issuance and notOnOrAfter 5 minutes after issuance). 

 

-DW





On Apr 19, 2020, at 2:50 AM, Vladimir Dzhuvinov <vladimir@connect2id.com <mailto:vladimir@connect2id.com> > wrote:

 

On 16/04/2020 10:10, Dominick Baier wrote:

iat vs nbf

What’s the rationale for using iat instead of nbf. Aren’t most JWT libraries (including e.g. the ..NET one) looking for nbf by default?

Developers often tend to intuitively pick up "iat" over "nbf" because it sounds more meaningful (my private observation). So given the empirical approach of Vittorio to the spec, I suspect that's how "iat" got here.

If we bother to carefully look at the JWT spec we'll see that "iat" is meant to be "informational" whereas it's "nbf" that is intended to serve (together with "exp") in determining the actual validity window of the JWT.

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7519#section-4.1.5

My suggestion is to require either "iat" or "nbf". That shouldn't break anything, and deployments that rely on one or the other to determine the validity window of the access token can continue using their preferred claim for that.

Vladimir

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