Re: [scim] Discussion Item: Personally Identifiable Information in SCIM

Just for the group's information, the current SCIM specs do have privacy considerations sections. The confusion may be that back then, privacy considerations was not a top level table of contents items.

Relevant sections in existing drafts are:
RFC7644 Section 7.5 - https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7644#section-7.5
RFC7643 Section 9 - https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7643#section-9. This covers both sensitive data (e.g. passwords) as well as discussion on privacy.

Section RFC7644 7.5.2 refers to the case I pointed out in the WG session.  The HTTP POST .search method was designed to avoid passing information in request URIs that may appear in other 
systems such as access logs which may be seen as inappropriate.

A compliant service provider implementation that allows searching of PII and sensitive data via GET should normally be returning HTTP status 403 (Forbidden) in response.  While one might argue that information has already been exposed by the client, it doesn’t help to compound the problem by confirming that the infromation requested is correct.

The SCIM POST Search solution I raised was the result of a “compromise” the SCIM WG had to make for PII. The SCIM WG informally raised the concerns with the HTTP WG.
The HTTPbis WG has discussed the problems of searching with HTTP GET many times before. 

Julian Reschke presented on the issue in IETF93 (giving a good explanation of the privacy issues):
https://httpwg.org/wg-materials/ietf93/ietf-93-httpbis-search.pdf

Going forwards….

The issue of searching using HTTP GET has re-surfaced again with a proposal for HTTP QUERY:
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-httpbis-safe-method-w-body/

If we end up talking about a SCIMbis effort, we may want to include support for safe query.  This would be fairly straight forward as we can take the body define in our POST search method and simply use the proposed HTTP QUERY method.

Phillip Hunt
@independentid
phil.hunt@independentid.com

> On Nov 13, 2021, at 7:36 AM, Danny Mayer <mayer@pdmconsulting.net> wrote:
> 
> On 11/11/21 10:13 AM, Janelle Allen (janelall) wrote:
> 
>> Hi there,
>>  
>> In the IETF session today, Phil mentioned privacy and the handling of PII.  A lot of legislation has occurred since SCIM 2.0. A question to this WG, should we be revisiting the core schema and marking some attributes as potentially containing PII?  
>> 
>> This caused me to ponder should we be thinking of modifying the core schema to identify which attributes may carry PII eg: the complex name attribute has the potential to carry PII,  should we consider adding a new item as a peer to “mutability” such as “containsPII: true/false”?. Or expand on the returned element such as returned: “restrictedPII”? or any other unmentioned method of addressing PII?
>>  
> I'd like to understand the use case for even providing PII data in SCIM. Most of the data that the SCIM Schemas currently are offering (see RFC7643) are not PII (though maybe ims and photos might be considered PII - Section 4.1.2). Having dealt with HR systems and their API's I know that there is only an extremely limited subset of data that should ever be made available to any outside system and you don't generally want to host it on a management platform if it is PII. I didn't attend the meeting so I don't know what the discussion was about. I personally feel that PII should NOT be made available through SCIM, but I'm willing to be persuaded otherwise as long as PII protections can be defined and required in any resulting document.
> 
> Danny
> 
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