Hi Rifaat,

 

Yes, we are aware of that work but got the feedback that at least some people 
were not that happy with the idea of introducing a dedicated/special nonce 
endpoint in OAuth. As far as I recall that was also the feedback at IETF 119 
where this draft was discussed?

 

As a side note: OpenID4VCI also went a similar route and introduced a dedicated 
nonce endpoint: 
https://openid.github.io/OpenID4VCI/openid-4-verifiable-credential-issuance-wg-draft.html#name-nonce-endpoint.

 

Best Regards,

Christian

 

Von: Rifaat Shekh-Yusef <rifaat.s.i...@gmail.com> 
Gesendet: 05 April 2025 21:57
An: Christian Bormann <chris.bormann=40gmx...@dmarc.ietf.org>
Cc: oauth <oauth@ietf.org>
Betreff: [OAUTH-WG] Re: Nonce fetching mechanism for Attestation-Based Client 
Authentication

 

Giuseppe and Orie have a draft that might be relevant to this discussion, as it 
describes a dedicated nonce endpoint:

https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-demarco-oauth-nonce-endpoint-00.html

 

Regards,

 Rifaat

 

 

On Sat, Apr 5, 2025 at 11:16 AM Christian Bormann 
<chris.bormann=40gmx...@dmarc.ietf.org <mailto:40gmx...@dmarc.ietf.org> > wrote:

Hi All,

 

We had a discussion about a nonce fetching mechanism for the Attestation-Based 
Client Authentication draft at the

IETF 122 session. Since we didn’t really reach a consensus there, we’d like to 
continue the discussion on the mailing list.

 

To summarize the problem briefly: The draft specifies a proof of possession 
that optionally signs over a server-provided

nonce to guarantee freshness of said proof of possession. Since we expect this 
specification to be used in some contexts

where creating a PoP might be expensive (e.g., require a user interaction), we 
were searching for a mechanism where

the nonce is not provided via an error  (as is the case for DPoP - which would 
often require the generation of 2 PoPs),

but in a way that guarantees that we have a fresh nonce before creating a PoP.

We were thinking about either 

*       a dedicated nonce endpoint (within the scope of an AS or RS)
*       or a mechanism to explicitly ask for a nonce in a request to an 
existing OAuth endpoint (e.g., the PAR endpoint).

 

After some discussion at OAuth Security Workshop, we proposed to use a 
dedicated header to signal a request for a new

nonce. This could work at any existing OAuth endpoint that wishes to use an 
attestation-based client authentication. Brian

rightfully mentioned that only adding one header field and completely changing 
the behaviour of said endpoint does not

sound like a good idea and proposed to use a different HTTP method. Brian 
initially proposed HEAD and after some more

discussion we ended with an OPTIONS request as the seemingly best idea. 

 

The idea as currently document in the draft is to use an OPTIONS request with a 
specific header field to request a nonce.

The current proposal would mean that for a request to a PAR endpoint

1.      The client discovers via metadata that the PAR endpoint requires 
attestation-based client authentication with a nonce
2.      The client sends an OPTIONS request:

OPTIONS /as/par HTTP/1.1

Host: as.example.com <http://as.example.com> 

attestation-nonce-request: true

3.      The client receives a nonce in the response:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK

Host: as.example.com <http://as.example.com> 

attestation-nonce: AYjcyMzY3ZDhiNmJkNTZ

4.      The client does the “real” request to the PAR endpoint including the 
client authentication (via header fields):

POST /as/par HTTP/1.1

Host: as.example.com <http://as.example.com> 

Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded

OAuth-Client-Attestation: eyJ0eXAiOiJvYXV0aC…

OAuth-Client-Attestation-PoP: eyJhbGciOiJFUzI…

 

response_type=code&state=af0ifjsldkj&client_id=s6BhdRkqt3

&redirect_uri=https%3A%2F%2Fclient.example.org <http://2Fclient.example.org> 
%2Fcb

&code_challenge=K2-ltc83acc4h0c9w6ESC_rEMTJ3bww-uCHaoeK1t8U

&code_challenge_method=S256&scope=account-information

 

At the IETF 122 session, Filip voiced concerns that since OPTIONS is used for 
CORS preflight requests, it would mean that at

least for frontend clients, this mechanism would result in several OPTIONS 
requests.  For JavaScript clients, the CORS preflight

requests cannot be used or modified and the client would then manually create 
another OPTIONS request to get the nonce.

>From a simple OPTIONS (preflight) and POST requests (normal request to PAR), 
>we would get to OPTIONS (preflight),

OPTIONS (nonce fetch), OPTIONS (preflight), POST requests.

 

We tried to capture those concerns in this issue: 
https://github.com/oauth-wg/draft-ietf-oauth-attestation-based-client-auth/issues/102
 

and would like to pick that discussion up again to find some consensus what the 
best option would be to for a nonce request.

 

Would people be more comfortable if we instead point to an endpoint that can be 
used to request a nonce (dedicated endpoint

that could for example, be discoverable via metadata), or is it fine to cause 
more requests and we should move ahead with the

current variant based on OPTIONS?

 

Best Regards,

Christian, Paul, Tobias

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