[OAUTH-WG] Another question on RFC 7009

Brian Campbell <bcampbell@pingidentity.com> Fri, 31 January 2014 16:58 UTC

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From: Brian Campbell <bcampbell@pingidentity.com>
Date: Fri, 31 Jan 2014 09:58:01 -0700
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To: oauth <oauth@ietf.org>
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Subject: [OAUTH-WG] Another question on RFC 7009
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Greetings WG,

In section 2.1 of RFC 7009, it says:

   "The authorization server first validates the client credentials (in
   case of a confidential client) and then verifies whether the token
   was issued to the client making the revocation request.  If this
   validation fails, the request is refused and the client is informed
   of the error by the authorization server as described below."

The only error described below is "unsupported_token_type" which doesn't
seem appropriate here. The errors in
http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6749#section-5.2 are referenced too and,
while "invalid_client" seems right for failed client authentication, what's
the intended way that the "request is refused and the client is informed of
the error" when the the token was not issued to the client making the
revocation request? None of the defined error codes seem to fit.

Furthermore, wouldn't it be better to go ahead and just revoke a token in
the case it's presented by the wrong client? I seem to recall some
discussion around this when 7009 was just a baby
draft-ietf-oauth-revocation and, while I don't recall the outcome, I was
surprised to look at the RFC again and see the text that is there.

These questions came to me by way of a developer working on implementing
the RFC. I didn't have good answers, beyond the prognostication herein, so
I thought I'd take the questions to the WG list and the document authors.

Thanks for any clarification,
Brian