Hi all,

Thanks for the reminder to send this email Eve! ;)

The paragraph in question is:

The authorization server MUST use a default-deny authorization assessment model in adding permissions to RPTs, that is, "everything that is not expressly allowed is forbidden" for resources for which resource servers have requested access permission on behalf of clients. Exercise caution in implementing default-deny because corner cases can inadvertently result in default-permit behavior. For example, it is insufficient simply to assume that all resources have some non-zero set of claims required for access, and then accept an empty set of supplied claims as sufficient for access.

I'm not convinced that this paragraph is really very useful, but that may be because it isn't clear at what level the 'deny' is relating to in this context - is it on a per-resource, per-scope, or an RPT level?

If per-resource, I think this is a reasonable thing to express, but I'm not sure the paragraph does a particularly good job of it.

If per-scope, does this only apply to additional scopes requested by the client?

If RPT, then I don't think the idea is correct, as the RPT shouldn't be denied based on the outcome of a particular policy for a particular resource.

On one of the calls I thought someone had mentioned that the RPT should only be granted if all of the scopes requested in the permission ticket were able to be granted, but I think it should be perfectly reasonable to grant a subset - e.g. if ticket requests view, edit for resource A and view for resource B but all that can be granted is view for A, then that is a perfectly reasonable response?

This was partly triggered by Mike's suggestion of patterned URIs, where I was thinking about the RS wants either view on A, view on B or view on C, because it knows that the actual requested URL is covered by all 3 of those registered resource sets (although as per other email, I wouldn't like that to be a pattern).

Sorry if this is slightly rambling.

Cheers,

James