Re: [OAUTH-WG] PAR and client metadata

[Brian Campbell <[e-mail]>]

On Thu, Apr 16, 2020 at 2:15 AM Filip Skokan <[e-mail]> wrote:

> I would support defining a client level property. I would also support an
> AS discovery property for an AS-wide policy that is signalled to all
> clients (and maybe that one would be enough).
>

I do think there needs to be something at the client level for it to be
useful. My thinking was that one AS-wide policy would be too broad to be of
much use. Many existing ASs will need to roll out PAR support over time or
more generally just support diverse clients with different capabilities and
requirements including PAR forever. The AS can advertise support for PAR by
including a "pushed_authorization_request_endpoint" parameter. Which is
roughly consistent with other AS metadata that's mostly about advertising
the set of supported capabilities. But do you think that an AS-wide policy
signal (i.e. all_yall_clients_gotta_do_par_every_darn_time : true) is
needed or sufficiently useful?


> FWIW (and this touches my earlier responses about the dpop scheme)
> defining metadata (both AS and Client) is beneficial not only for runtime
> (DCR, discovery) but in general supports developers using these specs, when
> they read about a possible behaviour in the document and there's a
> mentioned metadata property, they know what to look for in readmes, API
> documentation, UI etc. It saves time, theirs, and mine when i develop those
> behaviour toggles - i don't have to start mixing configuration objects so
> far composed entirely of IANA registered properties with proprietary ones,
> i don't need to come up with property names (and we know what a PITA that
> is) and it also saves time in the long run because it's less likely someone
> will open an issue about it.
>

That is good and useful perspective, thanks for sharing that.


Best,
> *Filip*
>
>
> On Tue, 14 Apr 2020 at 22:09, Brian Campbell <bcampbell=
> [e-mail]> wrote:
>
>> Using PAR can facilitate improved security by giving clients a
>> (relatively) simple means for sending a confidential, integrity protected,
>> and (for confidential clients anyway) authenticated authorization request.
>>
>> It seems like some of that improved security could be undermined by a
>> malicious actor somehow getting a user to navigate to a URL of a regular
>> old parameterized authorization request. One variation of the Mix-Up Attack
>> does this
>> https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-oauth-security-topics-15#section-4.4.1
>> for example and email, social media, online forums, etc., are other ways a
>> user might be tricked into following a maliciously crafted link.
>>
>> Following from that it seems logical that an authorization server might
>> want to restrict some clients from sending a regular parameterized
>> authorization request and instead require use of the PAR endpoint to
>> initiate an authorization request. Something like this could, of course, be
>> implemented as custom policy or configuration in any AS. But I'm thinking
>> it might be common enough to warrant adding a client metadata parameter to
>> the PAR draft specifically for it. The metadata (and registered extensions)
>> defined by Dynamic Client Registration [RFC7591] has come to imply a
>> general data model and expected associated behaviors for clients that is
>> useful for authorization server implementations, even when the Dynamic
>> Client Registration Protocol isn't directly in play. This particular
>> situation seems like a good potential candidate for a new such client
>> metadata parameter that would indicate that the given client can only use a
>> request_uri value obtained from the PAR endpoint to initiate an
>> authorization request. And that a regular old fashioned authorization
>> request from the given client would result in an error.
>>
>> Do the folks of this fine WG think something like this would be a
>> worthwhile addition to the PAR draft?
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
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