[Openid-specs-ab] OpenID Provider Commands - proposed WG specification

Sun Mar 2 23:19:54 UTC 2025

Dick,

I think I got it now... once I realized the RP needed an Internet facing
endpoint, it made more sense. I like the use of JWTs to send the commands,
that does solve one of the big problems with SCIM interoperability where
they say the endpoint is "OAuth protected" ... but not a whole lot more.
This use of JWT tokens for authorization fits perfectly in my view of
"Token Based Access Control" ("TBAC"). That's exactly what I've been saying
about how our old models for RBAC, ReBAC and ABAC are too human centric.
This domain-to-domain communication wouldn't fit in any of the older access
control mechanisms.

Honestly, my conversion of the non-human-readable version of your draft (by
ChatGPT) left out some important info. Since you published the
human-readable version, it makes a lot more sense :-) I was previously
thinking that the RP could be a mobile app or browser based app, which is
clearly not the case in your design, which seems targeted at
organization-to-organization communication (dare I say "federation"?).

I thought Aaron had some interesting comments... I have to think more about
what he said. But net-net, I like the direction this is going. For the
thousands of B2B services out there, this could be a good thing.

- Mike

PS: Looking forward to discussing this topic with you and Karl on
Identerati Office Hours Livestream, Episode 99, Thursday 3/27/2025 10:00
PST, see https://gluu.co/ioh-99  It should be a good warm up for IIW.

On Sun, Mar 2, 2025 at 5:59 AM Dick Hardt <dick.hardt at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Michael, I just saw this email, sorry for the delayed response ...
>
> On Mon, Feb 17, 2025 at 9:12 PM Michael Schwartz via Openid-specs-ab <
> openid-specs-ab at lists.openid.net> wrote:
>
>> Dick,
>>
>> 1. I don't really see the relationship between SCIM and SAML. Gluu
>> customers use SCIM to update all kinds of account information. Whether they
>> use SAML or OpenID depends on the RP.  But I agree that more RPs support
>> SAML in B2B websites... it just seems like a non-sequitur.
>>
>
> SCIM does provisioning & OP Commands does provisioning.
> SCIM is a way to manage a resource. The users and groups are
> independent, though often related, to SSO.
>
> OP Commands allows an OP to manage accounts from the OP at an RP.
>
>
>>
>> 2. You could in fact make a SCIM extension to send this kind of
>> information. For example, Gluu defined a FIDO SCIM extension because there
>> was no way to get a list of passkeys for a user, or to delete a user's lost
>> key.
>>
>
>  SCIM is based on the resource vs the OP data model
>
>
>> 3. Are you intending to specify that the RP will expose a non-SCIM stable
>> Internet facing backchannel web URL endpoint?
>>
>
> Yes
>
>
>>
>> 4. How would you protect this endpoint? SCIM left security out of scope.
>> And thus SCIM client libraries might or might not work, depending on how
>> they handle "OAuth" security.
>>
>
> This is one of the key advantages of OP Commands over SCIM. The commands
> are signed the same way that an ID Token is signed. IE reuses the existing
> JWKS endpoint. Does not need to use the same key as the ID Token, but
> public key is found same way by following `iss` value
>
>
>>
>> 5. So your solution does not want to support mobile or browser based
>> clients?
>>
>
> If there is a userpool, it is in a server.
>
>
>>
>> 6. Per my post
>> <https://www.linkedin.com/posts/nynymike_token-status-list-activity-7295937395122655233-F7Rs?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAArUy4Bb5Ha4b5n1mmyBhevew7nxXkSV14>
>> on Linkedin, I still think a pull based solution (i.e. based on OAuth
>> Status List) would be more lightweight. If you "push" messages, you will
>> need an RP endpoint or a long lived connection. Your spec could accomplish
>> all its goals by publishing a new kind of "Account JWT", and enabling the
>> RP to check the status of the JWT to see if anything changed. The advantage
>> of this is that the RP can get an update for **all** account tokens issued
>> by an OP at one time.  Plus the status token is very small. Once the RP is
>> aware of the change, then it can interact with the OP, perhaps through an
>> authorization request to get updated userinfo. Also, no need to deal with
>> how to protect this very sensitive RP endpoint. One more thought... if
>> Google has a billion users, as an RP do I really need to know about all the
>> accounts that got compromised, even if they logged into my system only once
>> in the past? I'd rather just check the account status when I see the person
>> again.
>>
>
> I think that is significantly more complicated. :)
>
>
>>
>> So I'm agreeing with your idea, just not with your approach on how to
>> solve it :-)
>>
>> - Mike
>>
>> --------------------------------------
>> Michael Schwartz
>> Gluu
>> Founder/CEO
>> mike at gluu.org
>> https://www.linkedin.com/in/nynymike
>>
>>
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