Delegation

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Full Title or Meme

Delegation allows the owner of access to a resource to give some subset of that ability to another party.

Context

  • The wiki page is focused on the need for a digital entity on the web to give some other party the ability to exercise some of the capability to some other digital entity.
  • In the case of human users of the web they will have a User Agent through which they can express their intents on the web.
  • Some examples of delegation include:
    • A manager goes on vacation and provides a temporary replacement with the ability to control access to the division web site repository.
    • A person is declared unfit to manage their affairs by a court of competent jurisdiction and a guardian is appointed.
    • A parent and a child have the reversed case where the parent gives the child some ability to visit web sites that have age restrictions.
    • The president of the United States goes into surgery and passes control of the nuclear deterrent to the vice president.
    • A husband and wife grant each other authority to make medical decisions for the other with a defined set of limitations.
    • I add medical conditions to my smartphone so that any authorized EMT can view them if i am found comatose. (Here the delegation is to a situational role.)

Use Cases

Actors

  • A valuable Resource that is hosted on a Resource Server (RS). (Typically data, but it could also be a service API.)
  • The Resource Owner (RO) that controls access to the Resource.
  • The user of the Resource that receives the delegation token from the Resource Owner.
  • The Relying Party (RP) that requests access to the Resource from the user.

Solutions

  • For this wiki the solution will be some sort of digital token niblet that identifies the subject and is signed by the subject private key.
  • The follows shows the elements of the niblet in json + jose({header}.{body}.{signature}) format that are included in the token.
  • The best practice for this token is to send it as a signed, but not encrypted jose formatted string with a JWS signature. This will allow the token to be embedded in the grant that is sent to a relying party by the user; and then on to the resource server.
Element Name Contents Explanation for category Cat
header key info required to validate the signature MUST
sub identifier of the RO the grantor of access MUST
puid Persistent Identifier of RO to handle recovery operation MAY
user Identifier of the recipient of this grant Must be link to a signing key MUST
[relation of user to subject array; parant; guardian; spouse; u13; emancipated; legal MAY
aud Identifier of the resource server Must be link to a decryption key MUST
scope Identifier of the resource to be shared array MAY
stipulation structure limits the scope of the grant MAY
exp Unix epoch date when delegation expires MAY
jwk key of the sub (the signer) include by value or by ref MAY
signature JWS created by the sub's key MUST
  • If a puid is used, there must be some mechanism to bind the puid to the sub that is outside the scope of this document. That mechanism will need to handle the recovery of access where the sub's authenticator cannot be used for any reason.
  • Relationship is designed to show access rights of user over subject data. e.g. guardian of the person is a legal authority, u13 means the subject is a child under the age of 13, both of these gives the legal authority. If the element is absent, the assumption must be that this is a pure delegation between consenting adults.

References