Hi Bill,

My reason for using OAuth rather than OIDC is because the id_token in OIDC is 
audience restricted to the client.  This was clearly intended for WebSSO / 
authentication to a client running on a web server.  It does not help the case 
where the user of a RESTful native client want to authenticate to a RESTful web 
service.

I agree that OAuth lacks a “defined” way to communicate what is in the AT (as 
OAuth does not define the content of the AT), but within an enterprise domain 
this is easy to solve by profiling.  And in any implementation of OAuth on the 
Internet, the AT must at some level identify the user to the RS.  Otherwise how 
else would the RS know who’s protected resources the client is trying to 
access?  Now whether the RS learns that through introspection or by parsing a 
JWT-structured AT is of course not defined.  But at the end of the day, the AT 
definitely (in all cases that I can think of) identifies the user.

I am open minded to using OIDC if in the future if the client can request an 
id_token that is audience restricted to the RS it is going to communicate.  In 
other words, yes I agree that OIDC is the preferred mechanism for performing 
“user authentication to a client,” but I also argue that OAuth is the best 
method to perform “user authentication to an RS” (if you want to get your RS 
out of the password consumption business).  I am not at all advocating OAuth 
for authentication to a client.

-adam

From: William Mills [mailto:wmills_92...@yahoo.com]
Sent: Tuesday, February 05, 2013 6:49 PM
To: Lewis Adam-CAL022; Tim Bray
Cc: "WG <oauth@ietf.org>"@il06exr02.mot.com
Subject: Re: [OAUTH-WG] Why OAuth it self is not an authentication framework ?

Why use OAuth when OpenID does everything that OAuth can do as an 
authentication method and does a few things much better?

Specifically OAuth lacks any defined way to:

-    feed back any additional information like the real user ID (as opposed to 
what the entered)
-    bound an authentication event in time
-    provide any form of additional SSO payload like a display name for the user

there's probably other things.

It'll mostly work but there are things it doesn't do.  Could you solve some of 
the rest of this with token introspection or a user API that the RP could use 
to fetch user info, sure, but why rebuild OpenID when OpenID exists?

-bill


________________________________
From: Lewis Adam-CAL022 <adam.le...@motorolasolutions.com>
To: Tim Bray <twb...@google.com>; William Mills <wmills_92...@yahoo.com>
Cc: "oauth@ietf.org WG" <oauth@ietf.org>
Sent: Tuesday, February 5, 2013 2:27 PM
Subject: RE: [OAUTH-WG] Why OAuth it self is not an authentication framework ?

I think this is becoming a largely academic / philosophical argument by this 
time.  The people who designed OAuth will likely point out that it was 
conceptualized as an authorization protocol to enable a RO to delegate access 
to a client to access its protected resources on some RS.  And of course this 
is the history of it.  And the RO and end-user were typically the same entity.  
But get caught up in what it was envisioned to do vs. real life use cases that 
OAuth can solve (and is solving) beyond its initial use cases misses the point 
… because OAuth is gaining traction in the enterprise and will be used in all 
different sorts of ways, including authentication.

This is especially true of RESTful APIs within an enterprise where the RO and 
end-user are *not* the same: e.g. RO=enterprise and end-user=employee.  In this 
model the end-user is not authorizing anything when their client requests a 
token from the AS … they authenticate to the AS and the client gets an AT, 
which will likely be profiled by most enterprise deployments to look something 
like an OIDC id_token.  The AT will be presented to the RS which will examine 
the claims (user identity, LOA, etc.) and make authorization decisions based on 
business logic.  The AT has not authorized the user to do anything, it has only 
made an assertion that the user has been authenticated by the AS (sort of 
sounds a lot like an IdP now).

All this talked of OAuth being authorization and not authentication was 
extremely confusing to me when I first started looking at OAuth for my use 
cases, and I think at some point the authors of OAuth are going to have to 
recognize that their baby has grown up to be multi-faceted (and I mean this as 
a complement).  The abstractions left in the OAuth spec (while some have 
claimed of the lack of interoperability it will cause) will also enable it to 
be used in ways possibly still not envisioned by any of us.  I think as soon as 
we can stop trying to draw the artificial line around OAuth being “an 
authorization protocol” the better things will be.

I like to say that they authors had it right when they named it “OAuth” and not 
“OAuthR” ☺

-adam

From: oauth-boun...@ietf.org [mailto:oauth-boun...@ietf.org] On Behalf Of Tim 
Bray
Sent: Tuesday, February 05, 2013 3:28 PM
To: William Mills
Cc: oauth@ietf.org WG
Subject: Re: [OAUTH-WG] Why OAuth it self is not an authentication framework ?

OIDC seems about the most plausible candidate for a “good general solution” 
that I’m aware of.   -T
On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 1:22 PM, William Mills 
<wmills_92...@yahoo.com<mailto:wmills_92...@yahoo.com>> wrote:
There are some specific design mis-matches for OAuth as an authentication 
protocol, it's not what it's designed for and there are some problems you will 
run into.  Some have used it as such, but it's not a good general solution.

-bill

________________________________
From: Paul Madsen <paul.mad...@gmail.com<mailto:paul.mad...@gmail.com>>
To: John Bradley <ve7...@ve7jtb.com<mailto:ve7...@ve7jtb.com>>
Cc: "oauth@ietf.org<mailto:oauth@ietf.org> WG" 
<oauth@ietf.org<mailto:oauth@ietf.org>>
Sent: Tuesday, February 5, 2013 1:12 PM
Subject: Re: [OAUTH-WG] Why OAuth it self is not an authentication framework ?

why pigeonhole it?

OAuth can be deployed with no authz semantics at all (or at least as little as 
any authn mechanism), e.g client creds grant type with no scopes

I agree that OAuth is not an *SSO* protocol.
On 2/5/13 3:36 PM, John Bradley wrote:
OAuth is an Authorization protocol as many of us have pointed out.

The post is largely correct and based on one of mine.

John B.

On 2013-02-05, at 12:52 PM, Prabath Siriwardena 
<prab...@wso2.com<mailto:prab...@wso2.com>> wrote:

FYI and for your comments..

http://blog.facilelogin.com/2013/02/why-oauth-it-self-is-not-authentication.html

Thanks & Regards,
Prabath

Mobile : +94 71 809 6732
http://blog.facilelogin.com/
http://rampartfaq.com/
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