Obtaining claims without requiring additional round trips

[Michael Jones]

From: Mike Jones Sent: Saturday, November 05, 2011 9:39 AM To: [e-mail] Subject: Obtaining claims without requiring additional round trips

As discussed during the working group call on Thursday, I received feedback on the current Connect design from a key Microsoft product architect based upon his product’s use cases. The high-order bit in his feedback was that he needs RPs to be able to access claims without making a second call to Check ID or UserInfo endpoints. Per the discussion on the call, the requirement to be able to access claims without additional round trips seems entirely reasonable and is motivated by real user-interface latency concerns.

To accomplish this, all claims would be carried in JWT tokens, which would then be directly used by the RPs. This conflicts with the current design decision that the access token is opaque and that UserInfo claims can only be retrieved by making a second call to the UserInfo endpoint. I propose that we change that decision before declaring implementer’s drafts.

Specifically, I would require that, in the normal case, the access token is a JWT containing the UserInfo claims (just like the ID Token is a JWT containing the logged-in session claims). If we decide that it’s important to allow some implementations to use a different token format, that should be the exception, not the default. In that exceptional case, those IdPs must declare in their discovery information that UserInfo claims must be retrieved from the UserInfo endpoint, and cannot be directly accessed within a JWT access token.

I’d promised on the call to write up this proposed change. This is that write-up. We’ll discuss this on the Monday call.

                                                        Best wishes,
                                                        -- Mike

P.S. Coincidentally, I also independently received essentially the same feedback from a different product architect yesterday, based upon his review of the specs.

[Michael Jones]

We could do this with a new userinfo response_type, as discussed in Nat's message about his self-issued OP prototype.

[Michael Jones]

The userinfo response_type is proposed for this purpose in issue #561 Messages - new response_type = id_token userinfo

[Nat Sakimura]

Duplicate of #561.