Musings on Digital Identity

Month: October 2021

OpenID and FIDO Presentation at October 2021 FIDO Plenary

OpenID logoFIDO logoI described the relationship between OpenID and FIDO during the October 21, 2021 FIDO Alliance plenary meeting, including how OpenID Connect and FIDO are complementary. In particular, I explained that using WebAuthn/FIDO authenticators to sign into OpenID Providers brings phishing resistance to millions of OpenID Relying Parties without them having to do anything!

The presentation was:

Proof-of-possession (pop) AMR method added to OpenID Enhanced Authentication Profile spec

OpenID logoI’ve defined an Authentication Method Reference (AMR) value called “pop” to indicate that Proof-of-possession of a key was performed. Unlike the existing “hwk” (hardware key) and “swk” (software key) methods, it is intentionally unspecified whether the proof-of-possession key is hardware-secured or software-secured. Among other use cases, this AMR method is applicable whenever a WebAuthn or FIDO authenticator are used.

The specification is available at these locations:

Thanks to Christiaan Brand for suggesting this.

OpenID Connect Presentation at IIW XXXIII

OpenID logoI gave the following invited “101” session presentation at the 33rd Internet Identity Workshop (IIW) on Tuesday, October 12, 2021:

The session was well attended. There was a good discussion about the use of passwordless authentication with OpenID Connect.

Server-contributed nonces added to OAuth DPoP

OAuth logoThe latest version of the “OAuth 2.0 Demonstration of Proof-of-Possession at the Application Layer (DPoP)” specification adds an option for servers to supply a nonce value to be included in the DPoP proof. Both authorization servers and resource servers can provide nonce values to clients.

As described in the updated Security Considerations, the nonce prevents a malicious party in control of the client (who might be a legitimate end-user) from pre-generating DPoP proofs to be used in the future and exfiltrating them to a machine without the DPoP private key. When server-provided nonces are used, actual possession of the proof-of-possession key is being demonstrated — not just possession of a DPoP proof.

The specification is available at:

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