Claim

Full Title or Meme

A statement by or about a Subject is a Claim. If there is some corroboration of the claim, it is called a Validated claim.

A collection of Attributes and other information about a user that are used in Authorization of access to a Resource.

Context

• The English word Claim means to call our for, or to publish, pretty much the same meaning as the Latin word clamare.
• The JWT spec defines it as "A piece of information asserted about a subject. A claim is represented as a name/value pair consisting of a Claim Name and a Claim Value."

Solution

Claims typically go through a series of steps, for example:

1. A User will go to a Web Site hosting a Resource that the user wants to access.
2. The Web Site will send a scope to a User asking for Claims to authorize access.
3. The User Agent should know, a priori, where to send the Claims for verification.
4. The Verified Claims will be collected and forwarded to the Web Site.
5. The Web Site will evaluate the Verified Claims and determine whether to authorize access to the resource.
6. Optionally the Web Site will request additional claims to meet the needs to authorize access.

• In computer networking a variety of statements can be made by a user to acquire authorized access to a resource.
• The distinction as to Authentication, who a user is, versus Authorization, or what that user is permitted to do, is no longer helpful.
• NIST has recognized that there are multiple metrics for the quality of statements about a user in their third update to SP 800-63
• Claims can be highly detailed, do to data fields, or a collection of fields, like the User address, this can be overwhelming if presented for User Consent. Some protocols, like OpenID Connect provide for aggregated collections of claims that OpenID calls Scope.