[ogsa-wg] [ogsa-authn-bof] Minutes of OGSA-WG + OGSA-AuthZ Joint telephone call 8 Mar 2007

[Blair Dillaway]

Nate,

I believe you mis-understood what I was trying to say. If one wishes to write an attribute-based authorization policy for a resource, one must know what attributes a client could provide. I can't, for example decide to write a group-based authZ policy unless I know some IdP(s) will tell me about what groups a client is affliated with and how that group attribute is encoded. As you mention there could be several different group attribute types used by different IdPs. There has to be some way for SPs to discover the IdPs vocabulary. This tends to be handled in various ad hoc ways and can be difficult to discover and track over time. I was suggesting that having a standard way of doing this for large distributed systems is valuable.

This is completely independent of whether client attributes are pushed, pulled, sent via intermediaries, and how an SP decides whether that info is trustworthy.

Regards,
Blair
________________________________
From: Nate Klingenstein [ndk at internet2.edu]
Sent: Thursday, March 08, 2007 3:39 PM
To: Blair Dillaway
Cc: Alan Sill; Hiro Kishimoto; OGSA AUTHZ WG; ogsa-wg; OGSA Authentication WG BoF
Subject: Re: [ogsa-authn-bof] Minutes of OGSA-WG + OGSA-AuthZ Joint telephone call 8 Mar 2007

Blair & Andrew,

I'm not sure the former -- having authorities describe what they're authoritative for -- is entirely desirable or practical.  When we discuss "authoritative for xyz data" in the context of identity information, I think it's necessary to append "for person abc" for it to have much meaning.  My IdP isn't your IdP, the same attribute may be expressed by multiple authorities, and my release policies are likely to vary by SP, so this appendix adds a great deal of complexity.  For each SP to manage and interpret the matrix of attributes/authorizations/identifiers and authorities for every principal they deal with strikes me as unreasonable and unnecessarily compromising of privacy.

This gets back to my core philosophy: the IdP should push everything it can, and for what it can't push(e.g. things it's not authoritative for), it should push the information needed to retrieve the additional attributes/authorizations, ideally via a discovery service associated with that user.  The discovery service can dynamically handle the user/authority/request pile and collect either raw data or pointers as appropriate.  If someday there's an intelligent client, then it can manage attribute and authorization locations for a principal internally, which is even better.

That said, I do think conversely there's value in SP's advertising the attributes or authorizations they need in order to reduce the need for callback queries, as those requirements are likely to be relatively static and unlikely to vary by IdP or user.

There are additional questions to consider when talking about attribute metadata, though.  Does some third party, e.g. a federation or a CA, need to vouch for my IdP's claim that it's able to assert staff at microsoft.com<mailto:staff at microsoft.com>?  Will that third party be universally trusted by all the SP's I deal with?

The SP retains, and will always have, the right to validate and interpret information it receives.  I believe it's the job of the authorities, intermediaries, and flows to preserve as much of that information as is practical so the SP has the basis for a decision once the information arrives.  Whether the SP would like to rely on the certification of an external authority or its own judgment, it's able to do so.  Any standard should recognize both sides of this coin.

Anyway, regardless of your own beliefs, the expression of both attribute expression and request is possible today by using the <RequestedAttribute> and <saml:Attribute> elements from the SAML 2.0 metadata profile.  Inasmuch as privileges and identifiers(NameIDFormat can be declared too, FWIW) can be thought of as attributes, I think this supports what you'd like to do, but not at the web services layer.  The Higgins project seems to be trying to do this using WSDL through the IdAS API, but I don't know enough about it to talk authoritatively.  ID-WSF and WS-Federation have somewhat coarse-grained abilities to express where attribute information is located as well.

Does this make any sense to you?
Nate.

On 8 Mar 2007, at 22:40, Blair Dillaway wrote:


[blaird] I see two important aspects to this. First, authorities need to be able to communicate what they are authoritative for (attributes, types of principal identities, ...) so that resource admins can know what they can rely upon in developing authZ policies. Second, resources need to be able to communicate what authenticated information they require (token types, which authorities, ...). WS-SecureConversation (http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/download.php/15979/oasis-wssx-ws-securitypolicy-1.0.pdf) could potentially be profiled as a way to do the latter. I'm not aware of an existing std that addresses the former.