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Reference Monitors for Security and Interoperability in OAuth 2.0

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Book cover Data Privacy Management and Autonomous Spontaneous Security (DPM 2013, SETOP 2013)

Abstract

OAuth 2.0 is a recent IETF standard devoted to providing authorization to clients requiring access to specific resources over HTTP. It has been pointed out that this framework is potentially subject to security issues, as well as difficulties concerning the interoperability between protocol participants and application evolution. As we show in this paper, there are indeed multiple reasons that make this protocol hard to implement and impede interoperability in the presence of different kinds of client. Our main contribution consists in a framework that harnesses a type-based policy language and aspect-based support for protocol adaptation through flexible reference monitors in order to handle security, interoperability and evolution issues of OAuth 2.0. We apply our framework in the context of three scenarios that make explicit variations in the protocol and show how to handle those issues.

This work has been partially supported by the CESSA ANR project (ANR 09-SEGI-002-01, http://cessa.gforge.inria.fr) and the A4Cloud project (FP7 317550, http://www.a4cloud.eu/).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See, e.g., Hammer: http://hueniverse.com/2012/07/oauth-2-0-and-the-road-to-hell.

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Correspondence to Jean-Claude Royer .

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Subtyping Rules and Endpoint Types Tables

Subtyping Rules and Endpoint Types Tables

Table 1 presents the main subtyping rules required in this paper and we give in Table 2 the endpoint types (without the refresh token option) in ACF. In these tables X.name denotes a provided service named name from agent X. The notation \(\mathtt{X.name~({<}numbering{>}) }\) corresponds to a required endpoint connected to X.name.

Table 1. Main subtyping rules
Table 2. ACF provided and required endpoint types table

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Cherrueau, RA. et al. (2014). Reference Monitors for Security and Interoperability in OAuth 2.0. In: Garcia-Alfaro, J., Lioudakis, G., Cuppens-Boulahia, N., Foley, S., Fitzgerald, W. (eds) Data Privacy Management and Autonomous Spontaneous Security. DPM SETOP 2013 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8247. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-54568-9_15

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-54568-9_15

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