Bound Token

Full Title or Meme

A data structure that passes strongly purpose bound Authorization grants to a Resource server.

Context

RFC 6750 "The OAuth 2.0 Authorization Framework: Bearer Token Usage" defines the Bearer Token.

Any party in possession of a bearer token (a "bearer") can use it to get access to the associated resources (without demonstrating possession of a cryptographic key). To prevent misuse, bearer tokens need to be protected from disclosure in storage and in transport.

The Bound Token is specifically designed to overcome several of the problems of a Bearer Token.

Problem

• Attacks against Bearer Tokens
• Distributed Identity has the feature of collecting User Claims from a variety of sources, not all of which have a relationship with the OP used to Authenticate the User.

• Any party in possession of a Bearer Token can use it to get access to the associated Resources. To prevent misuse, bearer tokens need to be protected from disclosure in storage and in transport.
• Bearer Tokens are valid only for as short time as possible. These tokens work like passwords, and if intercepted can be used immediately by an attacker. Therefore the OAuth2 (with bearer token) specification requires that all communication takes place over SSL - since no cryptography is built into the specification. Typically access tokens have a short validity, which can be refreshed with a "refresh token" which has longer validity but is only transferred when the initial bearer token is received by the consumer, and when a bearer token is refreshed.
• Microsoft reported the replay attack against Kerberos tokens and addressed the attack with Channel Binding.
• Token reuse: OAuth 2.0 or OpenID Connect use of bearer tokens raises the risk of token theft. For years architects have been waiting for Token Binding to get ratified so there would be transparent mechanism to close this gap. If this feature gets dropped from Chrome, this enterprise use case doesn't go away and only Microsoft Browsers support the feature.

• Bearer Tokens Considered Harmful is a paper that discusses the limitations of Channel Binding or other half-way measures to fix a broken security measure.

Solution

• This wiki page creates a new type of structure to address the problems noted above. It is currently just a draft proposal to get the conversation about the complete solution started.

Reference

• Bound Tokens, unlike Late Binding Tokens or Bearer Tokens cannot be re-purposed after they are created.

Microsoft Security Advisory 974926, Credential Relaying Attacks on Integrated Windows Authentication (2009-12-08) https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/security-updates/securityadvisories/2009/974926

Microsoft Directroy Services Team, Control Extended Protection for Authentication using Security Policy. https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/askds/2009/12/10/control-extended-protection-for-authentication-using-security-policy/