Re: [OAUTH-WG] problem statement

Mike,

I think this is a red herring. as this vector has nothing to do with
mobile apps. The attack that you've suggested is also possible with a
compromised browser on a desktop using the web flow. In this case, the
browser (UA) can steal the user's credentials and hand them to whoever
they want to when the user gets redirected. It doesn't have to be the
OAuth client that's phishing the credentials, after all. 

OAuth *does* work with phone apps, and it's a misnomer to say that it's
not a good idea in such environments. In all cases, you have to trust
the user agent and all of the mechanisms that let the user log into the
host site. But you have to do that in order to let the user log into the
host site at all. Fixing that is a larger problem for the web as a whole
and ultimately outside of OAuth.

 -- Justin

On Tue, 2011-09-06 at 15:28 -0400, Michael Thomas wrote:
> Melinda Shore wrote:
> > On 09/06/2011 11:11 AM, Jill Burrows wrote:
> >> I repeat, it is not an OAuth problem.
> > 
> > If I'm reading Mike correctly (and if I'm not it won't be the
> > first time I've misunderstood him), he's not really asking for
> > OAUTH to solve this particular problem but to clarify the
> > documents and beef up discussions of what is and is not in
> > scope.  He read the document and couldn't figure out whether
> > or not this particular problem is the business of the working
> > group.
> 
> I'm fairly certain that if somebody were deploying oauth for their servers
> that unless the document told me that oauth doesn't provide protection
> against third party snooping if it's embedded in any app, most people wouldn't
> have a clue that that was a dangerous assumption.
> 
> What this says is that oauth only works in one use case, and that only the
> user can tell the difference. Given the proliferation of phone apps and
> embedded webviews, it seems that the original assumptions of oauth are
> no longer up to date.
> 
> Mike
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