http://kantarainitiative.org/confluence/display/uma/UMA+legal+subgroup+notes

2016-03-11

  • Do these terms work for us as model definitions?
    • Resource Subject: Person to whom a digital data resource relates
    • Grantor: Person who manages access to a resource, either as its Resource Subject or that Person's behalf
    • Grantee: Person seeking access to a resource
  • How to address the subject/grantor split in the tough use cases
  • Tackling model clauses for RO/RSO
    • Does the brute force method help?
    • How can we address #RSctrl and #ROctrl needs – can we actually enumerate the exceptions?

Attending: Eve, Kathleen, Scott, Adrian, John W, Jim, Mary, Andrew, Thomas, Mark, Maciej

(As an aside, the fact that we're using Thomas's paid join.me account and had trouble reusing it because multiple people on the call have the app is an interesting "property rights" use case that is relevant to our problem! There's the potential for misuse of the paid account and the company often stomps on simultaneous use.)

Under consideration:

Resource Subject: The Person to whom a digital data resource relates
Grantor: The Person who manages access to a digital data resource, either as its Resource Subject or on that Person's behalf
Grantee: The Person seeking access to a resource

Is Grantee too "final" (vs. Requesting Party) given that they haven't yet been given access/had trust elevated? Maybe we need to split the RqP language similarly into two, to capture the states of "authorization not granted" and "authorization granted". To take an extreme example, there could be a policy condition that Bob the RqP gets access to some resource only on even-number hours of the clock. In this case, the AS can manage the token time-to-live characteristics very dynamically, the RS can check all the token authorization data frequently, etc. – but Bob will go from being a "potential Grantee" to being an "actual Grantee" really frequently. So the former phase or state is the more persistent, and the latter is the more transient. Trust elevation and degradation in Bob can be quite dynamic. (Also note that the same is true for the client app Bob uses.)

Note that any trust relationship between the (requesting party bundle of concepts) and the Resource Server Operator is entirely invisible to UMA. According to our scoping of our work, it should likely be invisible to us too. ??

But the (requesting party bundle of concepts) and the Authorization Server Operator does have a trust relationship once the authorization API token is issued, so we need to take care of that set of obligations.

  • RSO - ASO (client ID)
  • RO (Subj/Grantor?) - RSO - ASO (PAT)
  • C - ASO (client ID)
  • RqP (trust elev/degr?: Grantee) - C - ASO (AAT)
  • RqP (trust elev/degr?: Grantee) - RSO = no UMA relationship ???

The "Adrian clause" in the UMA Core spec is intended to reassure RSO's that they are free to elevate trust in the "requesting side" (that is, both the RqP and C) themselves. Note that the phrasing in the spec only allows further tightening; a clause a bit lower down makes clear that the intention is not for the RSO to enable loosening of access, although it's impossible in technical terms to prevent this. This is why we are working on how far we can take our model clauses to give RSOs the appropriate (and not inappropriate) flexibility to manage liability.

Eve suggests a group norm: Let's talk about "notice" and "consent" as consent life cycle words, and "notification" as what happens apart from that life cycle, so heads don't explode.

We agree on these model definitions for now:

Resource Subject: The Person to whom a digital data resource relates
Grantor: The Person who manages access to a digital data resource, either as its Resource Subject or on that Person's behalf

We have discovered an important "phase split" in considering "Grantee", and can't really use it outright as a wholesale replacement for Requesting Party.

For the world of devices, client apps, and so on, should we introduce "Agent"/"Entity"/something? Eve is wary of Agent from our legal discussions, but Kathleen could submit ideas to the list.

Eve reviewed her "brute force version" of the "RO-RSO" trust relationship. Note that the last bullet is the only one that represents a break-glass scenario; the party seeking access never established a trust relationship with the ASO, never got into the position of being a RqP/Grantee/etc., and is unknown (at least as far as UMA is concerned) to the RO.

Adrian has introduced the term "resource registration agreement". Is this a good name for the overall agreement representing this trust relationship? ("Resource protection agreement"?) How do we square the circle of having two "three-party" trust relationships? How should we name each of the trust relationships? Let's try and bat this around on the list before the next meeting.


Eve Maler
Cell +1 425.345.6756 | Skype: xmlgrrl | Twitter: @xmlgrrl