Mike Jones: self-issued

Musings on Digital Identity

Month: August 2014

Working Group Draft for OAuth 2.0 Act-As and On-Behalf-Of

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On August 21, 2014

In Claims, JSON, OAuth, Specifications

OAuth logoThere’s now an OAuth working group draft of the OAuth 2.0 Token Exchange specification, which provides Act-As and On-Behalf-Of functionality for OAuth 2.0. This functionality is deliberately modelled on the same functionality present in WS-Trust.

Here’s a summary of the two concepts in a nutshell: Act-As indicates that the requestor wants a token that contains claims about two distinct entities: the requestor and an external entity represented by the token in the act_as parameter. On-Behalf-Of indicates that the requestor wants a token that contains claims only about one entity: the external entity represented by the token in the on_behalf_of parameter.

This draft is identical to the previously announced token exchange draft, other than that is a working group document, rather than an individual submission.

This specification is available at:

An HTML formatted version is also available at:

Microsoft JWT and OpenID Connect RP libraries updated

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On August 20, 2014

In Claims, Cryptography, JSON, OAuth, OpenID, Software

This morning Microsoft released updated versions of its JSON Web Token (JWT) library and its OpenID Connect RP library as part of today’s Katana project release. See the Microsoft.Owin.Security.Jwt and Microsoft.Owin.Security.OpenIdConnect packages in the Katana project’s package list. These are .NET 4.5 code under an Apache 2.0 license.

For more background on Katana, you can see this post on Katana design principles and this post on using claims in Web applications. For more on the JWT code, see this post on the previous JWT handler release.

Thanks to Brian Campbell of Ping Identity for performing OpenID Connect interop testing with us prior to the release.

The Increasing Importance of Proof-of-Possession to the Web

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On August 14, 2014

In Claims, Cryptography, Documentation, Events, JSON, OAuth, Specifications

W3C logoMy submission to the W3C Workshop on Authentication, Hardware Tokens and Beyond was accepted for presentation. I’ll be discussing The Increasing Importance of Proof-of-Possession to the Web. The abstract of my position paper is:

A number of different initiatives and organizations are now defining new ways to use proof-of-possession in several kinds of Web protocols. These range from cookies that can’t be stolen and reused, identity assertions only usable by a particular party, password-less login, to proof of eligibility to participate. While each of these developments is important in isolation, the pattern of all of them concurrently emerging now demonstrates the increasing importance of proof-of-possession to the Web.

It should be a quick and hopefully worthwhile read. I’m looking forward to discussing it with many of you at the workshop!

OAuth Dynamic Client Registration specs addressing remaining WGLC comments

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On August 5, 2014

In Claims, OAuth, Specifications

OAuth logoAn updated OAuth Dynamic Client Registration spec has been published that finished applying clarifications requested during working group last call (WGLC). The proposed changes were discussed during the OAuth working group meeting at IETF 90 in Toronto. See the History section for details on the changes made.

The OAuth Dynamic Client Registration Management was also updated to change it from being Standards Track to Experimental.

The updated specifications are available at:

HTML formatted versions are also available at:

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