Re: [OAUTH-WG] OAuth and HTTP caching

Inline...

On Tuesday, September 22, 2009, Mark Nottingham <mnot@mnot.net> wrote:
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> On 22/09/2009, at 7:56 AM, John Panzer wrote:
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> On the server side, one of the concerns in the past has been security in shared hosting systems where e.g., basic auth data should be handled by a secure container (Apache) and not passed on in raw form to hosted CGI scripts.  So some of this comes back to what minimum level of hosting should be targeted by the specification -- and how much it should bend over backwards to deal with "challenged" environments.
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> That's a good discussion to have.
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> My $.02 is that we should follow the HTTP spec (Authorization: and WWW-Authenticate:) and take a minimum distance path to route around limited environments if necessary (X-Authorization: and X-WWW-Authenticate:, with exactly the same content, would be my proposal).
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> Ugh. By allowing other resources on the same server to see authentication credentials, wouldn't that just re-open these attacks?
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>

1. Oauth, at least when accessing protected resources, is designed to
be used over insecure connections, so the password sniffing attacks
don't apply.

2. The alternative on the table is to pass these as URL params, which
are more sniffable and also makes the web cry.

>
>
> --
> John Panzer / Google
> jpanzer@google.com / abstractioneer.org / @jpanzer
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>
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> On Mon, Sep 21, 2009 at 2:15 PM, Eran Hammer-Lahav <eran@hueniverse.com> wrote:
> As currently written, OAuth use of the HTTP authentication headers is optional at best.
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> The reason for that was based on concerns that some platforms do not provide access to the HTTP header in either the request or the reply. However, this might have significant ramifications on caching and other parts of HTTP where an indication of an authenticate interaction is needed.
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> Before the OAuth WG spends any time on discussing the various methods of sending authentication parameters, I would like to find out if using the authentication headers is more of a requirement for such a protocol.
>
> EHL
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>
>
>
> --
> Mark Nottingham     http://www.mnot.net/
>
>

-- 
--
John Panzer / Google
jpanzer@google.com / abstractioneer.org / @jpanzer

Received on Tuesday, 22 September 2009 16:28:56 UTC