Re: [OAUTH-WG] Signatures...what are we trying to solve?

[George Fletcher <[e-mail]>]

  Hi Zachary,

Here is a use case for signed messages. I've tried to keep this in the 
format of the other OAuth use cases. Please contact me off-list if there 
are editorial changes required. I've include the list to see if others 
have feed back on this use case.

Thanks,
George

Use case: Signed Messages

Description:

Alice manages all her personal health records in her personal health 
data store (www.myhealth.example.com) Alice's Primary Care Physician 
(www.pcp.example.com) recommends that Alice see a sleep specialist 
(www.sleepwell.example.com) Alice arrives at the sleep specialist's 
office and authorizes it to access her basic health data from her PCP. 
The application at www.pcp.example.com verifies that Alice has 
authorized www.sleepwell.example.com to access her health data as well 
as enforces that www.sleepwell.example.com is the only application that 
can retrieve that data with that specific authorization.

Pre-conditions:

* Alice has a personal health data store that allows for discovery of 
her participating health systems (e.g. psychiatrist, sleep specialist, 
pcp, orthodontist, ophthalmologist, etc).
* The application at www.myhealth.example.com manages authorization of 
access to Alice's participating health systems
* The application at www.myhealth.example.com can issues authorization 
tokens understood by Alice's participating health systems
* The application at www.pcp.example.com stores Alice's basic health and 
prescription records
* The application at www.sleepwell.com stores results of Alice's sleep tests


Post-conditions:
* A successful procedure results in just the information that Alice 
authorized being transferred from the Primary Care Physician 
(www.pcp.example.com) to the sleep specialist (www.sleepwell.example.com)
* The transfer of health data only occurs if the application at 
www.pcp.example.com can verify that www.sleepwell.example.com is the 
party requesting access and that the authorization token presented by 
www.sleepwell.example.com is issued by the application at 
www.myhealth.example.com with a restricted audience of 
www.sleepwell.example.com

Requirements:
* The application at www.sleepwell.example.com accesses 
www.myhealth.example.com to discover the location of the PCP system (XRD 
discovery)
* The application at www.sleepwell.example.com requests Alice to 
authorize access to the application at www.pcp.example.com for the 
purpose of retrieving basic health data (e.g. date-of-birth, weight, 
height, etc). The mechanism Alice uses to authorize this access is out 
of scope for this use case.
* The application at www.myhealth.example.com issues a token bound to 
www.sleepwell.example.com for access to the application at 
www.pcp.example.com. Note that a signed token (JWT) can be used to prove 
who issued the token.
* The application at www.sleepwell.example.com constructs a request 
(includes the token issued by www.myhealth.example.com) to the 
application at www.pcp.example.com
* The application at www.sleepwell.example.com signs the request before 
sending it to www.pcp.example.com
* The application at www.pcp.example.com receives the request and 
verifies the signature
* The application at www.pcp.example.com parses the message and finds 
the authorization token
* The application at www.pcp.example.com verifies the signature of the 
authorization token
* The application at www.pcp.example.com parses the authorization token 
and verifies that this token was issued to the application at 
www.sleepwell.com
* The application at www.pcp.example.com retrieves the requested data 
and returns it to the application at www.sleepwell.example.com



On 9/28/10 12:27 PM, Zeltsan, Zachary (Zachary) wrote:
>
> These use cases are not in the draft 
> https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-zeltsan-use-cases-oauth.
>
> Could you write them up?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Zachary
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> *From:* [e-mail] [mailto:[e-mail]] *On 
> Behalf Of *George Fletcher
> *Sent:* Tuesday, September 28, 2010 11:39 AM
> *To:* OAuth WG
> *Subject:* Re: [OAUTH-WG] Signatures...what are we trying to solve?
>
> I think of the signature issues as falling into two classes... I think 
> they map to your classification as well...
>
>     * *Signing tokens* is important for interoperability especially
>       looking forward to a time when tokens issued by multiple
>       Authorization Servers are accepted at a given host.
>     * *Signing messages* is important because it provides a mechanism
>       to ensure that the entity making the API call (and presenting an
>       access token) is really the entity that is allowed to make the
>       API call.
>
> Signing messages applies to the re-delegation use cases. I've heard 
> the need for this class of use cases from both the hData (health data) 
> community as well as the user managed access (UMA) community.
>
> Signing tokens covers both your second class of tokens as well as 
> another use case that Eran has mentioned as well. Namely, a protected 
> resource server honoring tokens from multiple Authorization Servers.
>
> These are the two classes of use cases that I'd like to see solved.
>
> Thanks,
> George
>
>
> On 9/28/10 12:58 AM, David Recordon wrote:
>
> If you know me then you'll know that I'm generally one of the last 
> people to talk about Alice and Bob. That said, there are a lot of 
> technical proposals flying across the list with very little shared 
> understanding of the problem(s) we're trying to solve.
>
> From what I've seen there are two distinct classes of signature use cases.
>
> 1) The first is where the HTTP request parameters must be part of the 
> signature. An example is any OAuth 1.0a style API where you want to 
> make sure that the HTTP POST your server just received isn't 
> masquerading itself as a GET.
>
> 2) The second is where the HTTP request is orthogonal. An example 
> is OpenSocial where the server is sending state information to the 
> client such as what user is currently logged in.
>
> The main practical example I have of the first use case is what 
> Twitter wants to do with redelegation. In this case TweetDeck can't 
> given TwitPic it's own bearer token, but needs to sign the POST 
> request and pass that signature to TwitPic for it to include in the 
> final API request to Twitter.
>
> In terms of signing protected resource requests, I haven't heard 
> anyone bring up specific and detailed needs for this recently.
>
> JSON tokens pretty clearly make sense for the second class of 
> signature use cases and it's actually a bit hard to argue why they 
> would be a part of OAuth. Facebook shipped this a bit over a month ago 
> for canvas applications. We include a `signed_request` parameter which 
> is signature.base64url(JSON). Parsing it is 18 lines of PHP. 
> http://developers.facebook.com/docs/authentication/canvas
>
> This second class of use case will also be required by OpenID Connect 
> where the server is signing identity information and sending it to the 
> client. I imagine that OpenSocial will also still have it and wish to 
> continue relying on public key algorithms.
>
> So a few questions:
>
>  * Do we want to tackle both of these classes of signatures in OAuth?
>
>  * Why do you consider the second class part of OAuth versus something 
> completely separate that might happen to include an OAuth access token?
>
>  * Is the Twitter redelegation use case the right focus for the first 
> class?
>
>  * Is there an example of an OAuth 2.0 server that can't use bearer 
> tokens for protected resource requests and thus requires signatures?
>
> Thanks,
>
> --David
>
>   
>
>   
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