Re: [OAUTH-WG] We appear to still be litigating OAuth, oops

[Warren Parad <[e-mail]>]

(I tend to trend lightly in the pronoun area, mostly because I'm shocked
that openid included gender but not pronouns)

I hadn't heard that to be called the NxM problem, so that definitely
cleared up the potential confusion (at least for me).

I think GNAPs lack of clarity is a non sequitur for the handling or not of
the multitrust arbitrary-client with arbitrary-service, however it's lack
of clarity for me prevents me from knowing whether GNAP actually seeks to
solve this problem. So from an OAuth WG perspective we can still ask:

*Is this or should this problem be left to GNAP to solve, or is an OAuth WG
responsibility?*

Warren Parad

Founder, CTO
Secure your user data with IAM authorization as a service. Implement
Authress <https://authress.io/>.


On Wed, Feb 24, 2021 at 12:39 PM Bron Gondwana <[e-mail]>
wrote:

> On Wed, Feb 24, 2021, at 22:04, Warren Parad wrote:
>
> I would prefer Bron to answer that question, as they are the one who
> started this email thread.
>
>
> You can also use he when talking about me, or she for that matter - I do
> enough group fitness classes where it's roughly assumed that the entire
> class is female, and I have an ambiguous enough name that I'm used to it.
> Most people use "he" most of the time.
>
> However let's look at GNAP, I've honestly been struggling to understand at
> least one fully documented case that GNAP supports. It seems in every
> document the only thing that is clear is GNAP wants to allow "everything",
> doesn't actually talk about an example.
>
>
> That's my biggest fear for GNAP - it too will try to be everything to
> everybody and wind up being nothing to nobody because the super flexible
> "everything protocol" is the same as no protocol at all, since you have to
> special-case everybody you talk to anyway.
>
> By NxM, I assume we mean that the end user or client is free to select
> whichever AS they want, in a way which the RS can verify the AS credential
> and the user identity, without the RS having to (and really without the
> ability to limit) which AS are allowed.
>
>
> Let's get down to use cases then, rather than talking in abstracts.
>
> I'm an end user with a copy of {The Bat email client} and I want to
> connect it to {Gmail} + {Yahoo} + {My ISP}.  It supports {POP3}, a widely
> popular open standard.  I want to be able to authenticate to each of those
> services without saving my plaintext passwords on my hard disk where the
> next {Windows ME} virus will exfiltrate them to {Noextraditionistan} and
> all my {Dogecoin} will then be exfiltrated from my {Paybuddy} account,
> leaving me destitute.
>
> But, {The Bat} doesn't have a trusted client cert from my isp, because who
> does - so there's no good protocol for me - it's either plaintext auth, or
> it's some architecture astronaut multi-party nonsense that's massively over
> specified and doesn't work half the time.  So I write a plain text password
> on a post-it note which is lying in the dust under my monitor because the
> glue has gone bad, and I hope I never accidentally click "remember me" when
> I type it in.
>
> That's been the reality of the end user experience for very many years.
>
> NxM means that you can authenticate an arbitrary client against an
> arbitrary server so long as they are both speaking a known public protocol,
> without needing to build a trust relationship between the client vendor and
> the server vendor first.
>
> Any "trust relationship" is made through a user both who trusts the client
> and trusts the server, and it's not transitive over to other users of the
> same client and the same server.  The client author doesn't need to get a
> signed "I trust you" from every single server, and the server author
> doesn't have to go identify every single client.
>
> That's what NxM means to a user, the ability to use arbitrary clients with
> arbitrary servers so long as they both implement a documented protocol.
> Interoperability.
>
> OAuth has not given interoperability in the NxM sense outside some simple
> web use cases.  They're nice and all, but they don't tend to be useful with
> open protocols - OAuth gets used for accessing proprietary API endpoints
> after getting an access key for a single provider.  At least you get Nx1 or
> 1xM out of it depending who's the N and who's the M, and maybe some of your
> code can rhyme so you're not doing everything from scratch each time.
>
> This is the sorry story of real open protocols.  The floor for true
> interoperability is still username + password over cleartext, over
> hopefully a TLS tunnel that's providing some level of protection.  Most so
> than a few years ago when Fastmail wrote our "starttls considered
> harmful"[1] objection to the IETF's habit at the time of putting a
> "STARTTLS" upgrade into an initially plaintext protocol, where an active
> intercepter could just strip the "I support STARTTLS" indicator from the
> protocol and convince the client to send the credentials in the clear.
>
> We're a little better mostly these days, but it's still a tirefire, and in
> my heart I do hold the OAuth working group's squatting on this area of the
> landscape while failing to address this burning need partially
> responsible.  The result (as Phillip pointed out upthread) has been a
> consolidation towards a few big players - because NxM becomes tractable
> when you reduce the N and M to small enough numbers.
>
> Bron.
>
> [1]
> https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/360058753834-SSL-TLS-and-STARTTLS
>
> --
>   Bron Gondwana, CEO, Fastmail Pty Ltd
>   [e-mail]
>
>
>