[Openid-specs-heart] HEART Scopes & Resource Sets

Eve Maler eve.maler at forgerock.com
Tue Jun 16 18:06:53 UTC 2015


Hi Thomas-- Delegation in this sense (actively choosing to assign
authorization rights to someone else) is something I'm working on a lot
lately. ("Delegation" is a word with a lot of meanings, sigh.) Obviously,
Alice-to-Bob sharing is supposed to be a key UMA benefit.

I think you're using "scope" in an odd sense by talking about "creating a
new scope for Bob". It's more like a policy in that case, or a policy
template or something. Or maybe you're suggesting that, through family
relationships, there's a kind of role basis for sharing ("mother-daughter")
that determines policy workflow, and when Bob differs enough from a
standard role, you have to peel him away from it. (Though God help us if we
replicate RBAC for ordinary consumers and patients. It doesn't even scale
in the enterprise.)

As for propagation, this may be a bit far afield for the main topic under
discussion in this thread, but for those who are interested, I see some
huge potential for how to drive layers of sharing policy off of graph
technology. (My colleagues recently did a forward-looking demo
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BAyu4KuSOI&index=8&list=PLK58Vrtd56-U4YkavFo0DR1yFpkw9G_lm>
of graph-driven policy with an IoT bent (24:00).)


*Eve Maler*ForgeRock Office of the CTO | VP Innovation & Emerging Technology
Cell +1 425.345.6756 | Skype: xmlgrrl | Twitter: @xmlgrrl
Join our ForgeRock.org OpenUMA <http://forgerock.org/openuma/> community!

On Tue, Jun 16, 2015 at 8:42 AM, Thomas Hardjono <hardjono at mit.edu> wrote:

>
> Folks,
>
> Sorry for having been absent for a while.
>
> >>> Eve:
> >>> In discussions with consumer IoT folks, it
> >>> seems that smart light bulbs want to be
> >>> gathered by "room".
>
> So this is the second time in two weeks that I've heard discussions about
> resources/scopes and OAuth2.0 (the other venue was related to IoT).
>
> (1) One of the problems with grouping resources (what we call "resource
> sets" here) is that there are always cases where there is an exception to
> the access being granted. For example, Alice has created a "resource set"
> called "lighting in the house". She wants to grant Bob (the electrician)
> access to this resource set with the exception of lighting in the kitchen,
> say. So the access control logic has to be able to handle this
> semantically. If there too many exceptions to the resource-set scope, then
> you may as well create a new scope just for Bob.
>
> (2) Relationships as a "resource" or "scope":  Should relationships be
> expressed as a resource or scope (or both/neither)? So in Josh's example,
> Alice and her Mom have a relationship that allows Mom to say "I grant my
> daughter permission to read my Med files". Not to get theoretical, but what
> if Alice has a sister Cathy who also qualifies as "daughter-of".
>
>
> I'm not sure if the OAuth WG ever addressed these issues, but in the UMA
> WG we really haven't addressed them sufficiently (too busy getting UMA core
> 1.0 finished). We also haven't addressed the issue of delegation and
> propagation of delegated rights.
>
> /thomas/
>
>
> ____________________________________________
>
>
> From: Openid-specs-heart [mailto:
> openid-specs-heart-bounces at lists.openid.net] On Behalf Of Justin Richer
> Sent: Tuesday, June 16, 2015 10:42 AM
> To: Eve Maler
> Cc: openid-specs-heart at lists.openid.net
> Subject: Re: [Openid-specs-heart] HEART Scopes & Resource Sets
>
> Eve,
>
> The main difference is that it’s not at all uncommon in the OAuth world to
> ask for authorization to multiple resources protected by the same AS
> simultaneously. In fact, this is seen as a *feature* of the OAuth approach,
> since it’s lower decision overhead for the user (when done right). In that
> case, if a client asks for “read write delete” scopes of an AS, the AS
> still needs to know *what* those scopes apply to. Since OAuth doesn’t have
> any type of resource or audience identifier (a big hole in the spec), this
> gap has been usually filled by having a scope identify the resource. Note
> that this is still semantically sensible and doesn’t go against what
> “scope” is defined as.
>
> This is where you get the matrix definition. You’ve got some scopes that
> mean “where can I do things” and others that mean “what can I do there”. I
> think Josh’s approach of “what.where” is reasonable given this technical
> constraint, and not without precedent. As far as the AS is concerned, it’s
> dealing with just strings from the client, but it can still easily make the
> UX of the authorization page a little smart based on the understood
> semantics of these well-defined scopes.
>
>  — Justin
>
> On Jun 15, 2015, at 7:44 PM, Eve Maler <eve.maler at forgerock.com> wrote:
>
> Hi Josh-- Below...
>
>
> Eve Maler
> ForgeRock Office of the CTO | VP Innovation & Emerging Technology
> Cell +1 425.345.6756 | Skype: xmlgrrl | Twitter: @xmlgrrl
> Join our ForgeRock.org OpenUMA community!
>
> On Mon, Jun 15, 2015 at 2:24 PM, Josh Mandel <
> Joshua.Mandel at childrens.harvard.edu> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I didn't mean to take a hard-line position on today's call about scope
> definitions! To my mind, our approach to scopes will need to work
> hand-in-hand with our approach to endpoint (or resource set) discovery --
> so I feel a bit awkward discussing scopes here in isolation. But that said,
> let me see if I can at least highlight the tension that we heard in the
> past hour's discussion (in a neutral way):
>
> ---
> Goal: Whatever the model, we want to support a use case where Alice signs
> into her resource server and can set some policies in an intuitive way.
> |She'd see something like (very, very roughly):
>
>  My Medications:
>  * Who can view?
>  * Who can write new prescriptions?
>
> My Step Counts
>  * Who can view?
>  * Who can remove?
> ---
>
> The question is about how this works under the hood.  I think we were
> discussing two models:
>
> Model 1: The "UMA-First" approach
> We have a resource set like "Alice's Medications", with scopes like "view"
> and "prescribe". And we'd have a resource set like "Alice's Step Counts"
> with scopes like "view" and "delete".
>
> Model 2: The "OAuth-First" approach
> We have a resource set like "Alice's FHIR Endpoint", with scopes like
> "Medications.view", "Medications.prescribe", "Steps.view", and
> "Steps.delete".
>
>
> Talking about an "OAuth-first" approach for setting policies is making me
> confused. I know what it looks like to enable OAuth-like flows in UMA when
> Alice is both the requesting party and the owner of the resource. And I
> know what it looks like to enable Alice to set policies at an UMA
> authorization server (which might hold the results of a previous OAuth-like
> flow done in UMA). But I don't know what "setting policies in OAuth" means
> because the OAuth experience is about consenting at run time (possibly
> checking and unchecking individual scopes), and revoking tokens at the
> AS/RS.
>
> So the closest UX analog would probably be the wording displayed in an
> OAuth consent dialog, maybe something like:
> • View [and prescribe] your medications
> • View [and delete] your steps
>
> If the *types* of Resource Sets and the allowed scopes are standardized in
> advance (which UMA supports), then a mapping between Model 1 and "vanilla"
> OAuth could be as simple as: "concatenate the UMA resource set type
> followed by ':' followed by the UMA scope name" -- so for example, you
> might derive an OAuth scope like "
> https://openid.net/heart/resource-types/StepCounts:https://openid.net/heart/scopes/view".
> Or under Model 2, the scopes could be reused directly (no mapping required).
>
> In what sense is "reuse" meant here? A coding model, or an architectural
> model, or a semantic model?... There are ways in which I could imagine a
> deep kind of semantic reuse being possible without concatenation tricks
> being necessary. However, not being a developer, I'm not sure if they match
> what you're thinking of.
>
> For example, in my previous response to the minutes email, I outlined how
> some APIs have implicit mappings between scopes and acceptable
> endpoints/resources to which they apply.
>
> Let's say (totally making this up) the FHIR has two endpoints, with one
> endpoint for medication records and one for fitness steps. There's an
> UMA-standardized resource type for each. There's "
> https://www.hl7.org/fhir/rsrc/med.json", with instances of it registered
> with scopes "view", "download", "transmit", and "add" (so some clients can
> insert new entries). Alice's medications might be in a resource something
> like "/alice/meds". (What's displayed in her AS dashboard might look a lot
> nicer than that.) And there's "https://www.hl7.org/fhir/rsrc/step.json",
> with instances of it registered with scopes "view", "download", "transmit",
> and "chart". Alice's steps might be in a resource like "/alice/steps".
>
> (If the scopes are in the form of URIs, they could be standardized to a
> further degree, in that a bunch of metadata could be pulled by the
> authorization server and used to present standard labels and icons, and
> other semantics could be linked to them.)
>
> If the very same API were OAuth-protected, with the very same resource
> endpoints, there might still be the same resource endpoints, with the same
> scopes, where three of them work on both resource types, "add" only works
> on "med", and "chart" only works on "step". These resources could still
> have a standardized meaning in terms of both resource naming and
> schema/format; there just would be nowhere to "hook" a standardized
> resource type URI into.
>
> Seen this way, the OAuth approach and the UMA approach are quite similar,
> differing only in the implicitness vs. explicitness of the resource set
> layer.
>
>
> Of course, some interesting things happen when we layer in details like...
>
> What if Alice has access to multiple records (say, her own and her
> mother's)? In vanilla OAuth the binding of permissions to these records is
> generally implicit. How should they play out in UMA? Under Model 1, we'd
> probably see two more Resource Sets created ("Alice's Mom's Medications"
> and "Alice's Mom's Steps"). Under Model 2, we'd probably see one more
> Resource Set created ("Alice's Mom's FHIR Endpoint").
>
> I've been doing some work around chained delegation of this sort. Indeed,
> these are separate records, and must remain that way. Alice may not have
> all the permissions over her mother's records that she has over her own!
> One way to present such "downstream" items is to present them under a
> separate "Shared With" area. And there are various ways to organize owned
> items, e.g. by who you tend to share them with or by function. In
> discussions with consumer IoT folks, it seems that smart light bulbs want
> to be gathered by "room".
>
> FWIW...
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