Where web and enterprise meet on user-managed access

Phil Hunt shared some musings on OAuth and UMA recently. His perspective is valuable, as always. He even coined a neat phrase to capture a key value of UMA’s authorization manager (AM) role: it’s a user-centric consent server. Here are a couple of thoughts back.

In the enterprise, an externalized policy decision point represents classic access management architecture, but in today’s Web it’s foreign. UMA combines both worlds with the trick of letting Alice craft her own access authorization policies, at an AM she chooses. She’s the one likeliest to know which resources of hers are sensitive, which people and services she’d like to share access with, and what’s acceptable to do with that access. With a single hub for setting all this up, she can reuse policies across resource servers and get a global view of her entire access landscape. And with an always-on service executing her wishes, in many cases she can even be offline when an access requester comes knocking. In the process, as Phil observes, UMA “supports a federated (multi-domain) model for user authorization not possible with current enterprise policy systems.”

Phil wonders about privacy impacts of the AM role given its centrality. In earlier federated identity protocol work, such as Liberty’s Identity Web Services Framework, it was assumed that enterprise and consumer IdPs could never be the authoritative source of all interesting information about a user, and that we’d each have a variety of attribute authorities. This is the reality of today’s web, expanding “attribute” to include “content” like photos, calendars, and documents. So rather than having an über-IdP attempt to aggregate all Alice’s stuff into a single personal datastore — presenting a pretty bad panoptical identity problem in addition to other challenges — an AM can manage access relationships to all that stuff sight unseen. Add the fact that UMA lets Alice set conditions for access rather than just passively agree to others’ terms, and I believe an AM can materially enhance her privacy by giving her meaningful control.

Phil predicts that OAuth and UMA will be useful to the enterprise community, and I absolutely agree. Though the UMA group has taken on an explicitly non-enterprise scope for its initial work, large-enterprise and small-business use cases keep coming up, and cloud computing models keep, uh, fogging up all these distinctions. (Imagine Alice as a software developer who needs to hook up the OAuth-protected APIs of seven or eight SaaS offerings in a complex pattern…) Next week at the Cloud Identity Summit I’m looking forward to further exploring the consumer-enterprise nexus of federated access authorization.