Re: [OAUTH-WG] JWS Access Token concerns

[Vladimir Dzhuvinov <[e-mail]>]

Hi Sergey,

JWE will indeed make the token content confidential to clients. However,
without a proper signature (RSA or EC, HMAC in JWS doesn't qualify), the
RS cannot establish the origin of the token. With symmetric crypto (e.g.
JWE alg=dir) anyone who has the shared key will be able to create a
token (e.g. other RS in the domain that rely on the AS). With asymmetric
crypto, anyone with access to the public key of the RS will be able to
encrypt for the recipient.

Hope this helps,

On 23/02/16 19:15, Sergey Beryozkin wrote:
> Hi
>
> Some OAuth2 providers may return self-contained access tokens which
> are JWS Compact-encoded.
> I wonder is it really a good idea and would it not be better to only
> JWE-encrypt the tokens. I'm not sure JWS signing the claims is
> necessarily faster then only encrypting the claims, assuming the
> symmetric algorithms are used in both cases.
>
> For example, my colleague and myself, while dealing with the issue
> related to parsing an access token response from a 3rd party provider
> were able to easily check the content of the JWS-signed access_token
> by simply submitting an easily recognized JWS Compact-formatted value
> (3 dots) into our JWS reader - we did not have to worry about
> decrypting it neither the fact we did not validate the signature
> mattered.
>
> But access tokens are opaque values as far as the clients are
> concerned and if the introspection is needed then the introspection
> endpoint does exist for that purpose...
>
> Thanks, Sergey
>
>
>
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