[OAUTH-WG] AS Discovery in Distributed Draft

[Justin P Richer <[e-mail]>]

In the meeting tonight I brought up a response to the question of whether to have full URL or plain issuer for the auth server in the RS response’s header. My suggestion was that we have two different parameters to the header to represent the AS: one of them being the full URL (as_uri) and one of them being the issuer to be constructed somehow (as_issuer). I ran into a similar problem on a system that I built last year where all of our servers had discovery documents but not all of them were easily constructed from an issuer style URL (using OIDC patterns anyway). So we solved it by having two different variables. If the full URL was set, we used that; if it wasn’t, we tried the issuer; if neither was set we didn’t do any discovery.

I’m sensitive to Torsten’s concerns about complexity, but I think this is a simple and deterministic solution that sidesteps much of the issue. No pun intended.

— Justin