[Openid-specs-ab] Lite Draft 8

[Johnny Bufu]

On 11-08-16 04:31 PM, John Bradley wrote:
> The two tokens have potentially different scopes and lifetimes.
>
> There are good reasons for separating resource authorization from session authentication.

An OAuth token is, conceptually, an identifier for a grant that the 
server keeps in its database.

Rather than emitting two different tokens, the server could associate 
the two grants with a single token, and service it differently based on 
the endpoint the token is presented at:
- the sorter-lived, one-time use grant for the check session endpoint
- the longer-lived, multiple-use grant for the userinfo endpoint

This single token would be a short identifier, not a heavy(er) JWT, 
suitable for lite clients.

On 11-08-17 07:35 PM, John Bradley wrote:
 > We did discuss using a JWT for the access token so that it could do
 > double duty.
 > Some people like Sales Force have existing code for there access tokens
 > so they don't want to change that.
 > Another issue is token size, making the session token carry all of the
 > scope information for the user-info and other endpoints may make the
 > token too large to be practical.
 >
 > It would also be more complicated for the RP to get right, than keeping
 > the session and access grant tokens separate.

Full clients wanting a signed JWT for optimization could indicate this 
in the authorization request. There shouldn't be much of a problem for 
servers to use the JWT as an identifier / access token for the userinfo 
grant, but full-clients' life should be made easier by including an 
equivalent but shorter userinfo access token in the JWT payload.


Thoughts on this proposal? I'd like to find out if I missed anything 
that would prevent it from covering the use-cases I've seen brought up 
on the list recently.


Johnny