Re: [OAUTH-WG] TMI BFF - html meta tags over/alternative to discovery

[Brian Campbell <[e-mail]>]

The interim discussion can be found here
https://codimd.ietf.org/s/notes-ietf-interim-2021-oauth-09-oauth#Discussion
but the general context, as I understand it, is that there's a desire to
have the location of the two application endpoints be conveyed to the
frontend in a defined way that avoids out-of-band configuration and also
doesn't infringe on the application namespace. The current draft places the
two endpoints directly in .well-known but a number of folks have stated
reasons that's less than ideal or even unworkable in many common
deployments. Moving to a single static document in .well-known that lists
the endpoint locations is one alternative approach. This thread suggests a
different alternative of placing the locations in HTML meta/link tags or
link headers returned with the application's main html page.


On Sun, May 16, 2021 at 2:04 AM Warren Parad <wparad=
[e-mail]> wrote:

> I agree, missing context for this:
>
> As discussed in the interim, a well known set of endpoints (or even a
> single root client discovery document) might not always be available for
> control to the webpage depending on where and how it is hosted, on the
> other hand the HTML it serves always, I hope, is.
>
> Wouldn't this only be used as input to a SDK, why wouldn't you just define
> the configuration in javascript, like everything else?
>
> Also, is it required or something that can be added later?
>
> On Sun, May 16, 2021, 09:26 Philippe De Ryck <
> [e-mail]> wrote:
>
>> Without having the full context of the interim meeting, this feels really
>> off to me. I see the need for making this configurable, but I have doubts
>> about using HTML elements for this purpose.
>>
>> As far as I understand, this mechanism is supposed to be used for modern
>> frontends (Angular, React, …). Having to add variables to the index.html in
>> these applications is likely to conflict with their development paradigms.
>> It would be much easier to add these variables to the environment file, so
>> you can differentiate between dev and prod when necessary.
>>
>> Additionally, querying the DOM for API endpoints sounds like a lot of
>> trouble. I don’t think that injection is that big of a risk, but I might be
>> wrong (I’m sure someone said that about the base tag as well). However,
>> using DOM APIs like this will cause headaches for server-side rendering,
>> where these DOM APIs are typically not available (e.g.,
>> https://stackoverflow.com/questions/62896223/is-there-a-way-to-access-dom-serverside
>> ).
>>
>> Kind regards
>>
>> Philippe
>>
>> —
>> *Pragmatic Web Security*
>> *Security for developers*
>> https://pragmaticwebsecurity.com/
>>
>>
>> On 15 May 2021, at 17:35, Filip Skokan <[e-mail]> wrote:
>>
>> Hello Vittorio, Brian, everyone
>>
>> This is a followup to my feedback in the TMI BFF interim meeting on April
>> 26th where I mentioned I'd bring this to the list for discussion.
>>
>> I proposed an alternative to using fixed endpoint locations and/or
>> discovery. HTML <meta> Tags <https://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_meta.asp>
>> .
>>
>> These would be in the returned page HTML's head tag, e.g.
>>
>> <meta name="oauth-bff-token" content="/api/bff-token">
>>> <meta name="oauth-bff-sessioninfo" content="/api/bff-sessioninfo">
>>
>>
>> The javascript SDK handing TMI BFF would know to look for these defined
>> meta tags to source the location of the different endpoints. I think this
>> could be the primary place an SDK would look at as it doesn't require any
>> upfront external requests.
>>
>> For the SDK this is as simple as
>>
>> var bffTokenPath =
>>> document.querySelector('meta[name="oauth-bff-token"]').content;
>>
>>
>> If this was the only mechanism defined by the document (to be bashed) I
>> think it can save the group a lot of time defining a client discovery
>> document which would be otherwise needed. If discovery as an alternative
>> solution is indeed inevitable, it can be a second in line mechanism the
>> javascript SDK would know to use.
>>
>> As discussed in the interim, a well known set of endpoints (or even a
>> single root client discovery document) might not always be available for
>> control to the webpage depending on where and how it is hosted, on the
>> other hand the HTML it serves always, I hope, is.
>>
>> Best,
>> *Filip Skokan*
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