No, it will just be very short giving an introduction to how to use tokens in 
general, how to define token types, and will include two examples for bearer 
tokens and mac tokens.

EHL

From: Torsten Lodderstedt [mailto:tors...@lodderstedt.net]
Sent: Sunday, January 16, 2011 11:00 AM
To: Eran Hammer-Lahav
Cc: OAuth WG
Subject: Re: [OAUTH-WG] Removal: 'OAuth2' HTTP Authentication Scheme

wouldn't that mean to drop section 6 completely?

regards,
Torsten.

Am 15.01.2011 07:32, schrieb Eran Hammer-Lahav:
One of the main problems with OAuth in general has always been the unsanitary 
mix of authorization and authentication ("it's an authentication protocol... 
authorization protocol... authentication protocol" [1]). It has always been a 
confusing mess. The work on 2.0 has provided a valuable abstraction and 
separation of the two components, especially the recent document split. In 
addition, the recent work on the bearer token document and the MAC token type 
have raised issues about OAuth and its relationship with HTTP authentication.

I would like to suggest we drop the 'OAuth2' WWW-Authenticate header completely 
from the specification for the following reasons:


Draft oauth-v2 is clearly not an authentication protocol. It *utilizes* client 
authentication. It offers one fully defined method for client authentication 
(which is basically HTTP Basic+), provides a half-baked client assertion 
authentication hook, and leaves all end-user authentication out of scope.

The WWW-Authenticate header has absolutely no value, interoperability-wise or 
otherwise. Discovery was rules to be beyond the scope of this specification. 
Having a protected resource declare it supports authentication using some 
unspecified credentials obtained using some unspecified client flow is 
confusing at best. In the future, an interoperable discovery mechanism will be 
needed to allow clients to interact with completely unknown protected 
resources, but this has been consistently ruled to be premature standardization 
at this point.

OAuth is agnostic to token authentication, and we already have three discrete 
token type proposals - all with active deployment plans in the coming months. 
Two of these methods have already defined a full HTTP authentication scheme 
(even if the bearer token specification has not yet been updated to change its 
scheme name).

HTTP *authentication* is not an appropriate facility to negotiate 
*authorization*. OAuth authorization discovery can be added to HTTP 
authentication schemes as attributes, but makes no sense as a scheme of its 
own. The issues we are having with 'realm' is one of the examples showing that 
we are abusing the header.

Again, as specified, it adds no value and I am not aware of any existing OAuth 
1.0a implementation making use of the response header for client 
interoperability (yes, many include it, but how many clients actually rely on 
it, and if they do, how?).

For these reasons I would like to suggest we:


Drop the WWW-Authenticate header definition and OAuth2 scheme from the 
specification, leaving it up to each token type to define its own 
authentication flow. In the future, a comprehensive discovery specification 
should define a new HTTP response header for providing discovery information. I 
have suggested using Link: rel='authorization' as a simple yet powerful 
solution.

Rename the document to 'The OAuth 2.0 Authorization Protocol' to make it clear 
what this document is really about.

Comments? Counter argument?

EHL

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0IBZocFkXGY






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