[OAUTH-WG] Cryptographic hygiene and the limits of jwks_uri

["Richard Backman, Annabelle" <[e-mail]>]

I originally brought up this issue in the context of the PAR draft, but since it broadly applies to the OAuth space I’m starting a new thread…

Section 3.12 of the JWT BCP<https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-oauth-jwt-bcp-07#section-3.12> says: “Use different keys for different kinds of JWTs.” Section 4 of the JWT Profile for OAuth 2.0 Access Tokens<https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-oauth-access-token-jwt-03#section-4> says: “An authorization server MAY elect to use different keys to sign id_tokens and JWT access tokens.” These statements are consistent with good cryptographic hygiene. And we’ve made it difficult to impossible for an AS to follow them.

The AS has a single metadata document containing a single URI referencing a single JWK Set. But the AS has no way of indicating to clients which keys to use for which purposes. For example, an AS cannot say that *only these* keys are to be used to encrypt id_token_hint JWTs, and *only these* keys are to be used to encrypt JAR request object JWTs. For encryption, the AS could enforce that logic internally, but there is no way for the client to discover this. And while the AS may be built to only use certain keys for signing ID Tokens and other keys for signing JWT access tokens, it has no way to indicate this to the client. So even if ID Token generation and access token generation are isolated in different microservices within the AS, each microservice is capable of forging the other’s tokens, because consumers can’t be told to distinguish between different keys for the AS.

This seems like a ticking time bomb to me, as it’s a non-obvious side effect of combining various OAuth 2.0 extensions, and it can undermine a lot of sophisticated effort to follow security best practices. I can see a couple of ways to address this (e.g., more sophisticated AS key metadata, tagging or similar use case indication on JWKs), but before trying to propose something I’d like to get people’s opinions on the problem. Is this already mitigated in other ways? Has the ship sailed on this for OAuth, and now we have to live with it? Should this be left to the deployments that care to solve with non-interoperable solutions? Are there other clever ways we could approach this? Are there other angles that we need to consider?

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Annabelle Richard Backman
AWS Identity