Hi Brian,

On Apr 28, 2009, at 1:36 PM, Brian Eaton wrote:

>
> On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 8:25 PM, pkeane <pjke...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> I'm happy with  OAuth for the typical sorts of social networking,
>> photo-sharing, etc. use cases, and I use it for that.  But I'd very
>> much like to be able recommend it for more highly secure scenarios
>> here on campus (I work in higher ed) that might involve confidential
>> records.  For OAuth to replace or be used in conjunction with the
>> cuurent campus SSO and federated systems like Shibboleth, we would
>> really need that extra level of verifiable security.
>
> Hi Peter -
>
> SSO systems such as SAML/OpenID/others all use the equivalent of a
> callback token to bind the session at the identity provider to the
> relying party.  The fix to the OAuth protocol is to make it look just
> like the "campus SSO and federated systems" that you mention above:
>
> OpenID: signature on authentication response.
> SAML POST profile: signature on authentication response.
> SAML artifact profile: random single-use artifact value.
>
> All of those systems pass a value that is unpredictable to the
> attacker to a trusted location at the consumer site.  None of those
> systems force the user to do anything as obnoxious as manually type a
> pin at the consumer site.

All of these protocols are for Web-browser based SSO, and establish  
the trust between the consumer and SP (using the OAuth terminology) by  
relying on Web-browser technologies (ie. an HTTP redirect sent through  
the user's browser assures that the browser is the same one at SP as  
it was at consumer).

I do not think the assumptions of OAuth are the same as for those  
protocols. At least not currently. And I would be wary of going that  
way without more thought.

> If you think manually typing a pin increases security, you should
> explain the attack you're trying to prevent.  Why should OAuth have
> such a requirement if SAML and OpenID don't?


I think the security requirement is that you ensure that the entity  
making a request to the consumer to start the OAuth process is the  
same entity which is authenticated to the SP. Are you arguing that the  
callback URL suffices in that regard?

Cheers,

- johnk


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