Trying to understand Solid-OIDC better
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Description
I'm working on a decentralized app and Solid-OIDC is very close to the type of authentication system I need, and I'm wondering if I can adopt it instead of doing a home-grown system. Sorry this turned out long but I would appreciate any answers.
My current design is essentially:
- Client app creates a key pair, hashes the public key, and uses that key as the nonce in an OIDC flow with any OIDC provider (Google, GitLab, LastLogin, self-hosted, etc). The goal is for the OIDC provider to certify (perhaps unwittingly) that the
subowner controls the key pair, a la OpenPubKey. - When the app makes requests to backend servers, it includes the ID token and a DPoP header for each request. Assuming the backend trusts the OIDC provider, requests are now authenticated, without requiring a previous relationship between the app and the backend server.
After reading through the Solid-OIDC primer, I see a couple areas of incompatibility due to extra steps. Since with auth extra steps often indicate potential security holes, I want to make sure I understand why they're necessary in the Solid case:
- Why is the UMA step necessary? My understanding is the purpose is that Alice could define specific permissions for Bob, then when Bob gets a token it's scoped to those permissions. But won't he always get the same permissions? Why not skip UMA altogether and just verify it's Bob making each request using a method similar to what I described above?
- Why is it necessary for the OP to add
solidtoaud? Does it matter if Bob wants to use his key pair to interact with multiple backends and multiple protocols? The main downside I see here is you can no longer use any OIDC provider, but must use a Solid-OIDC provider.
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First steps
- Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
- Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
- Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
- Open a pull request that references the issue number.
Research direction
Start with the Solid-OIDC primer and trace the UMA step and the requirement to include solid in the OIDC aud claim. Compare those requirements with the proposed key-pair, ID-token, and DPoP flow. Done means the compatibility questions and security rationale are answered or clarified in the specification documentation.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Assessment
- Domain
- authentication, security
- Issue type
- Documentation
- Difficulty
- 4/5
- Estimated time
- 3-5 days
- Activity status
- Stale
- Clarity
- Needs clarification
- Newbie friendliness
- 20/100