[oslc-core] OAuth and delegated UIs

[Jim des Rivieres]

Using OAuth to access a protected delegated UI URL doesn't work well in 
practice. Let me explain why.

Even if you arrange to pass OAuth credentials when the browser 
dereferences the delegated UI URL to some HTML page, any follow-on GETs 
the browser makes to retrieve subsidiary resources - images, css style 
sheets, scripts, etc. - will not bear any OAuth credentials. So if any of 
these are protected resources, the browser will be hit with some kind of 
authentication challenge unless the user has already logged in to the 
site. Web browsers generally don't take kindly to receiving authentication 
challenges when retrieving subsidiary resources needed to show an HTML 
page - often they give up with "error loading page". 

The problem is that web browsers are not prepared to play the role of 
OAuth consumer.  Web browsers are only prepared to pass Basic auth 
credentials and roundtrip cookies. 

For this reason, dereferencing a delegated UI URL will usually require a 
normal log-in to the target server to establish a session, and it will be 
these session credentials that will unlock access to the delegated UI URL 
web page and subsidiary resources.

---Jim des Rivieres



From:
Steve K Speicher/Raleigh/IBM at IBMUS
To:
Jim des Rivieres <Jim_des_Rivieres at ca.ibm.com>
Cc:
Ed Gentry/Portland/IBM at IBMUS, oslc-core at open-services.net
Date:
01/10/2011 02:02 PM
Subject:
Re: [oslc-core] OAuth and delegated UIs



I guess I don't fully understand, as OAuth is about "enabling delegated 
access to protected resources" [1].
If an application has an access token then it would seem that it should 
use it with its request.  Given the browser context and the delegated UI 
resource, the request for this resource is done by creating an iframe and 
setting the src attribute to the delegated UI URL.

I'm not a strong advocate for this, I'm just arguing a position to make 
sure we are not putting constraints on some resource "types" and how 
certain class of clients access them.  Also there appears to be some spec 
[2] to support this in OAuth already.  An implementer came to me with this 

as an approach as well.

[1] - http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5849
[2] - http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5849#section-3.5.3

Thanks,
Steve Speicher | IBM Rational Software | (919) 254-0645


Jim des Rivieres <Jim_des_Rivieres at ca.ibm.com> wrote on 01/06/2011 
04:14:11 PM:

> From: Jim des Rivieres <Jim_des_Rivieres at ca.ibm.com>
> To: Steve K Speicher/Raleigh/IBM at IBMUS
> Cc: oslc-core at open-services.net, Ed Gentry/Portland/IBM at IBMUS
> Date: 01/06/2011 04:14 PM
> Subject: Re: [oslc-core] OAuth and delegated UIs
> 
> Since you mention the delegated UI sections, it bears noting that 
passing 
> OAuth parameters to request URLs (whether by header, body, or embedded 
in 
> the URL) does not make sense for web page URLs meant to be displayed in 
a 
> web browser; e.g., picker URLs. OAuth 1.0 is not about authenticating a 
> user in a browser talking to a server, but about authorizing servers 
> talking between themselves.
> 
> Regards,
> Jim des Rivieres
> 
> 
> 
> From:
> Steve K Speicher <sspeiche at us.ibm.com>
> To:
> oslc-core at open-services.net
> Date:
> 01/06/2011 02:44 PM
> Subject:
> [oslc-core] OAuth and delegated UIs
> Sent by:
> oslc-core-bounces at open-services.net
> 
> 
> 
> It would be desirable if OSLC Core spec were to recommend (SHOULD) that 
> service providers be prepared to handle OAuth parameters embedded in the 


> request URI [1]
> If a provider of the delegated UIs didn't support this, it could just 
> ignore it.   This would provide some improvements to usability where 
> setting up single solutions may not be available.
> 
> I propose that we add this to the delegated UI sections (or maybe just 
the 
> 
> OAuth section)?
> 
> [1] - http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5849#section-3.5.3
> 
> Thanks,
> Steve Speicher | IBM Rational Software | (919) 254-0645
> 
> 
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