Internet DRAFT - draft-bertocci-oauth-step-up-authn-challenge
draft-bertocci-oauth-step-up-authn-challenge
Web Authorization Protocol V. Bertocci
Internet-Draft Auth0/Okta
Intended status: Standards Track B. Campbell
Expires: 23 September 2022 Ping Identity
22 March 2022
OAuth 2.0 Step-up Authentication Challenge Protocol
draft-bertocci-oauth-step-up-authn-challenge-01
Abstract
It is not uncommon for resource servers to require different
authentication strengths or freshness according to the
characteristics of a request. This document introduces a mechanism
for a resource server to signal to a client that the authentication
event associated with the access token of the current request doesn't
meet its authentication requirements and specify how to meet them.
This document also codifies a mechanism for a client to request that
an authorization server achieve a specific authentication strength or
freshness when processing an authorization request.
Status of This Memo
This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the
provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.
Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
Task Force (IETF). Note that other groups may also distribute
working documents as Internet-Drafts. The list of current Internet-
Drafts is at https://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/.
Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months
and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any
time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference
material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."
This Internet-Draft will expire on 23 September 2022.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (c) 2022 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
document authors. All rights reserved.
This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
Provisions Relating to IETF Documents (https://trustee.ietf.org/
license-info) in effect on the date of publication of this document.
Please review these documents carefully, as they describe your rights
Bertocci & Campbell Expires 23 September 2022 [Page 1]
Internet-Draft OAuth Authn Challenge March 2022
and restrictions with respect to this document. Code Components
extracted from this document must include Revised BSD License text as
described in Section 4.e of the Trust Legal Provisions and are
provided without warranty as described in the Revised BSD License.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1.1. Conventions and Definitions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2. Protocol Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
3. Authentication Requirements Challenge . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
4. Authorization Request . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
5. Authorization Response . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
6. Authentication Information Conveyed via Access Token . . . . 7
6.1. JWT Access Tokens . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
6.2. OAuth 2.0 Token Introspection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
7. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
8. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
9. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
10. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Appendix A. Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
Appendix B. Document History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
1. Introduction
In simple API authorization scenarios, an authorization server will
statically determine what authentication technique to use to handle a
given request on the basis of aspects such as the scopes requested,
the resource, the identity of the client and other characteristics
known at provisioning time. Although the approach is viable in many
situations, it falls short in several important circumstances.
Consider, for instance, an eCommerce API requiring different
authentication strengths depending on whether the item being
purchased exceeds a certain threshold, dynamically estimated by the
API itself using a logic that is opaque to the authorization server.
An API might also determine that a more recent user authentication is
required based on its own risk evaluation of the API request.
This document extends the error codes collection defined by [RFC6750]
with a new value, insufficient_user_authentication, which can be used
by resource servers to signal to the client that the authentication
event associated with the access token presented with the request
doesn't meet the authentication requirements of the resource server.
This document also introduces acr_values and max_age parameters for
the WWW-Authenticate response header defined by [RFC6750], which the
resource server can use to explicitly communicate to the client the
required authentication strength or recentness.
Bertocci & Campbell Expires 23 September 2022 [Page 2]
Internet-Draft OAuth Authn Challenge March 2022
The client can use that information to reach back to the
authorization server with an authorization request specifying the
authentication requirements indicated by protected resource, by
including the acr_values or max_age parameter as defined in [OIDC].
Those extensions will make it possible to implement interoperable
step up authentication with minimal work from resource servers,
clients and authorization servers.
1.1. Conventions and Definitions
The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT",
"SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "NOT RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and
"OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in BCP
14 [RFC2119] [RFC8174] when, and only when, they appear in all
capitals, as shown here.
2. Protocol Overview
Following is an end-to-end sequence of a typical step-up
authentication scenario implemented according to this specification.
The scenario assumes that, before the sequence described below takes
place, the client already obtained an access token for the protected
resource.
+----------+ +--------------+
| | | |
| |-----(1) resource request------>| |
| | | |
| |<-------(2) challenge ----------| Resource |
| | | Server |
| | | |
| |-----(5) resource request ----->| |
| | | |
| |<---(6) protected resource -----| |
| | +--------------+
| Client |
| |
| | +---------------+
| | | |
| |---(3) authorization request--->| |
| | | |
| |<-------------...-------------->| Authorization |
| | | Server |
| |<------ (4) access token -------| |
| | | |
+----------+ +---------------+
Bertocci & Campbell Expires 23 September 2022 [Page 3]
Internet-Draft OAuth Authn Challenge March 2022
Figure 1: Abstract protocol flow
1. The client requests a protected resource, presenting an access
token.
2. The resource server determines that the circumstances in which
the presented access token was obtained offer insufficient
authentication strength and/or freshness, hence it denies the
request and returns a challenge describing (using a combination
of acr_values and max_age) what authentication requirements must
be met for the resource server to authorize a request.
3. The client directs the user agent to the authorization server
with an authorization request that includes the acr_values and/or
max_age indicated by the resource server in the previous step.
4. After whatever sequence required by the grant of choice plays
out, which will include the necessary steps to authenticate the
user in accordance with the acr_values and/or max_age values of
the authorization request, the authorization server returns a new
access token to the client. The access token contains or
references information about the authentication event.
5. The client repeats the request from step 1, presenting the newly
obtained access token.
6. The resource server finds that the user authentication performed
during the acquisition of the new access token complies with its
requirements, and returns the requested protected resource.
The validation operations mentioned in step 2 and 6 imply that the
resource server has a way of evaluating the authentication level by
which the access token was obtained. This document will describe how
the resource server can perform that determination when the access
token is a JWT Access token [RFC9068] or is validated via
introspection [RFC7662]. Other methods of determining the
authentication level by which the access token was obtained are
possible, per agreement by the authorization server and the protected
resource, but are beyond the scope of this specification.
3. Authentication Requirements Challenge
This specification introduces a new error code value for the error
parameter of [RFC6750] or authentication schemes, such as
[I-D.ietf-oauth-dpop], which use the error parameter:
insufficient_user_authentication The authentication event associated
Bertocci & Campbell Expires 23 September 2022 [Page 4]
Internet-Draft OAuth Authn Challenge March 2022
with the access token presented with the request doesn't meet the
authentication requirements of the protected resource.
Note: the logic through which the resource server determines that the
current request doesn't meet the authentication requirements of the
protected resource, and associated functionality (such as expressing,
deploying and publishing such requirements) is out of scope for this
document.
Furthermore, this specification defines additional WWW-Authenticate
auth-param values to convey the authentication requirements back to
the client.
acr_values A space-separated string indicating, in order of
preference, the authentication context class reference values that
the protected resource requires the authentication event
associated with the access token.
max_age Indicates the allowable elapsed time in seconds since the
last active authentication event associated with the access token.
Below you can find an example of WWW-Authenticate header using the
insufficient_user_authentication error code value to inform the
client that the access token presented isn't sufficient to gain
access to the protected resource, and the acr_values parameter to let
the client know that the expected authentication level corresponds to
the authentication context class reference identified by myACR.
HTTP/1.1 401 Unauthorized
WWW-Authenticate: Bearer error="insufficient_user_authentication",
error_description="A different authentication level is required",
acr_values="myACR"
Figure 2
If the resource server determines that the request is also lacking
the scopes required by the requested resource, it MAY include the
scope attribute with the scope necessary to access the protected
resource, as described in section 3.1 of [RFC6750].
4. Authorization Request
A client receiving an authorization error from the resource server
carrying the error code insufficient_user_authentication MAY parse
the WWW-Authenticate header for acr_values and max_age and use them,
if present, in a request to the authorization server to obtain a new
access token complying with the corresponding requirements. Both
acr_values and max_age authorization request parameters are OPTIONAL
Bertocci & Campbell Expires 23 September 2022 [Page 5]
Internet-Draft OAuth Authn Challenge March 2022
parameters defined in Section 3.1.2.1. of [OIDC]. This document does
not introduce any changes in the authorization server behavior
defined in [OIDC] for precessing those parameters, hence any
authorization server implementing OpenID Connect will be able to
participate in the flow described here with little or no changes.
See Section Section 5 for more details.
The example request below indicates to the authorization server that
the client would like the authentication to occur according to the
authentication context class reference identified by myACR.
GET https://as.example.net/authorize?client_id=s6BhdRkqt3
&response_type=code&scope=purchase&acr_values=myACR
Figure 3
5. Authorization Response
Section 5.5.1.1 of [OIDC] establishes that an authorization server
receiving a request containing the acr_values parameter MAY attempt
to authenticate the user in a manner that satisfies the requested
Authentication Context Class Reference, and include the corresponding
value in the acr claim in the resulting ID Token. The same section
also establishes that in case the desired authentication level cannot
be met, the authorization server SHOULD include in the acr claim a
value reflecting the authentication level of the current session (if
any). The same section also states that if a request includes thee
max_age parameter, the authorization server MUST include the
auth_time claim in the issued ID Token. An authorization server
complying with this specification will react to the presence of the
acr_values and max_age parameters by including acr and auth_time in
the access token (see Section 6 for details). Although [OIDC] leaves
the authorization server free to decide how to handle the inclusion
of acr in ID Token when requested via acr_values, when it comes to
access tokens in this specification it is RECOMMENDED that the
requested acr value is treated as required for successfully
fulfilling the request. That is, the requested acr value is included
in the access token if the authentication operation successfully met
its requirements, or that the authorization request fails in all
other cases, returning unmet_authentication_requirements as defined
in [OIDCUAR]. The recommended behavior will help prevent clients
getting stuck in a loop where the authorization server keeps
returning tokens that the resource server already identified as not
meeting its requirements hence known to be rejected as well.
Bertocci & Campbell Expires 23 September 2022 [Page 6]
Internet-Draft OAuth Authn Challenge March 2022
6. Authentication Information Conveyed via Access Token
To evaluate whether an access token meets the protected resource's
requirements, the resource servers needs a way of accessing
information about the authentication event by which that access token
was obtained. This specification provides guidance on how to convey
that information in conjunction with two common access token
validation methods: the one described in [RFC9068], where the access
token is encoded in JWT format and verified via a set of validation
rules, and the one described in [RFC7662], where the token is
validated and decoded by sending it to an introspection endpoint.
Authorization servers and resource servers MAY elect to use other
encoding and validation methods, however those are out of scope for
this document.
6.1. JWT Access Tokens
When access tokens are represented as JSON Web Tokens (JWT)
[RFC7519], the auth_time and acr claims (per Section 2.2.1 of
[RFC9068]) are used to convey the time and context of the user
authentication event that the authentication server performed during
the course of obtaining the access token. It is useful to bear in
mind that the values of those two parameters are established at user
authentication time and won't change in the event of access token
renewals. See the aforementioned Section 2.2.1 of [RFC9068] for
details. The following is a conceptual example showing the decoded
content of such a JWT access token.
Header:
{"typ":"at+JWT","alg":"RS256","kid":"LTacESbw"}
Claims:
{
"iss": "https://as.example.net",
"sub": "someone@example.net",
"aud": "https://rs.example.com",
"exp": 1646343000,
"iat": 1646340200,
"jti" : "e1j3V_bKic8-LAEB_lccD0G",
"client_id": "s6BhdRkqt3",
"scope": "purchase",
"auth_time": 1646340198,
"acr": "myACR"
}
Figure 4
Bertocci & Campbell Expires 23 September 2022 [Page 7]
Internet-Draft OAuth Authn Challenge March 2022
6.2. OAuth 2.0 Token Introspection
OAuth 2.0 Token Introspection [RFC7662] defines a method for a
protected resource to query an authorization server about the active
state of an access token as well as to determine metainformation
about the token. The following two top-level introspection response
members are defined to convey information about the user
authentication event that the authentication server performed during
the course of obtaining the access token.
acr Authentication Context Class Reference. String specifying an
Authentication Context Class Reference value that identifies the
Authentication Context Class that the user authentication
performed satisfied.
auth_time Time when the user authentication occurred. A JSON
numeric value representing the number of seconds from
1970-01-01T00:00:00Z UTC until the time of date/time of the
authentication event.
The following example shows an introspection response with
information about the user authentication event by which the access
token was obtained.
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: application/json
{
"active": true,
"client_id": "s6BhdRkqt3",
"scope": "purchase",
"sub": "someone@example.net",
"aud": "https://rs.example.com",
"iss": "https://as.example.net",
"exp": 1639528912,
"iat": 1618354090,
"auth_time": 1646340198,
"acr": "myACR"
}
Figure 5
7. Security Considerations
[[TBD]]
Bertocci & Campbell Expires 23 September 2022 [Page 8]
Internet-Draft OAuth Authn Challenge March 2022
Remember that oauth is not authN, you need a layer like OIDC to
handle that part. This is not an encouragement to abuse oauth. This
is about the authentication event of the user to the AS by which the
access token was obtained.
8. IANA Considerations
[[TBD]]
The insufficient_user_authentication error code in the "OAuth
Extensions Error" registry [IANA.OAuth.Params].
Section 6.2 for acr and auth_time as top-level members of the
introspection response in the "OAuth Token Introspection Response"
registry [IANA.OAuth.Params].
The acr_values and max_age WWW-Authenticate auth-params are "new" but
doesn't seem like any registration is needed or possible.
9. Normative References
[RFC2119] Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate
Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119,
DOI 10.17487/RFC2119, March 1997,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc2119>.
[RFC6750] Jones, M. and D. Hardt, "The OAuth 2.0 Authorization
Framework: Bearer Token Usage", RFC 6750,
DOI 10.17487/RFC6750, October 2012,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc6750>.
[RFC7662] Richer, J., Ed., "OAuth 2.0 Token Introspection",
RFC 7662, DOI 10.17487/RFC7662, October 2015,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7662>.
[RFC8174] Leiba, B., "Ambiguity of Uppercase vs Lowercase in RFC
2119 Key Words", BCP 14, RFC 8174, DOI 10.17487/RFC8174,
May 2017, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8174>.
[RFC9068] Bertocci, V., "JSON Web Token (JWT) Profile for OAuth 2.0
Access Tokens", RFC 9068, DOI 10.17487/RFC9068, October
2021, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc9068>.
10. Informative References
Bertocci & Campbell Expires 23 September 2022 [Page 9]
Internet-Draft OAuth Authn Challenge March 2022
[I-D.abr-twitter-reply]
Roach, A., "A reply to a specific tweet", Work in
Progress, Internet-Draft, draft-abr-twitter-reply-00, 7
September 2018, <https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/
draft-abr-twitter-reply-00>.
[I-D.ietf-oauth-dpop]
Fett, D., Campbell, B., Bradley, J., Lodderstedt, T.,
Jones, M., and D. Waite, "OAuth 2.0 Demonstrating Proof-
of-Possession at the Application Layer (DPoP)", Work in
Progress, Internet-Draft, draft-ietf-oauth-dpop-06, 1
March 2022, <https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-
ietf-oauth-dpop-06>.
[IANA.OAuth.Params]
IANA, "OAuth Parameters",
<https://www.iana.org/assignments/oauth-parameters>.
[OIDC] Sakimura, N., Bradley, J., Jones, M., de Medeiros, B., and
C. Mortimore, "OpenID Connect Core 1.0 incorporating
errata set 1", 8 November 2014,
<http://openid.net/specs/openid-connect-core-1_0.html>.
[OIDCUAR] Lodderstedt, T., "OpenID Connect Core Error Code
unmet_authentication_requirements", 8 May 2019,
<https://openid.net/specs/openid-connect-unmet-
authentication-requirements-1_0.html>.
[RFC7519] Jones, M., Bradley, J., and N. Sakimura, "JSON Web Token
(JWT)", RFC 7519, DOI 10.17487/RFC7519, May 2015,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7519>.
Appendix A. Acknowledgements
I wanted to thank the Academy, the viewers at home, the shampoo
manufacturers, etc..
Initially (kinda) discussed at the OAuth Security Workshop 2021
A number of others already but haven't kept track...
Appendix B. Document History
[[ To be removed from the final specification ]]
-01
* Fixed example
Bertocci & Campbell Expires 23 September 2022 [Page 10]
Internet-Draft OAuth Authn Challenge March 2022
* Clarified/noted that scope can also be in the WWW-Authenticate/401
-00
* Initial Individual Draft (with all the authority thereby bestowed
[I-D.abr-twitter-reply]).
Authors' Addresses
Vittorio Bertocci
Auth0/Okta
Email: vittorio@auth0.com
Brian Campbell
Ping Identity
Email: bcampbell@pingidentity.com
Bertocci & Campbell Expires 23 September 2022 [Page 11]
