I've been trying to understand the use case for the assertion flow (
http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-oauth-v2-05#section-3.10) .
Conversely, I have a use case for bootstrapping, and I'm trying to
understand if the assertion flow is the right flow for that use case.

The bootstrapping use case I have in mind is to allow a client to interact
with a related set of services by bootstrapping from client secret to an
access token, and then from that access token to other access tokens.  For
example, in a "login" interaction the client would get a generic access
token.  Later, to use various services -- access to personal data, access to
friends' data, attempts to do uploads -- the client would ask the security
token server for access to new resources by URI, and if access was granted,
receive new access tokens which could be used on those services.  The client
secret is not reused very often, and policy is centralized.

This seems similar to other use cases being discussed and so it's possible
my main point of confusion is trying to tie this to the assertion flow
instead of something else.

The assertion flow has the right number of parties involved, and it could
certainly be hacked/extended to do bootstrapping: instead of the client
secret, the general session access token could be used, and the "assertion"
field can contain anything including the URI of the service that the client
now wants.  However I wondered if something less generic could make this
more interoperable.

Any thoughts?

Thanks,
Lisa
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