Summary
Using OAuth 2 to authenticate with Synapse has many benefits over using older authentication mechanisms. We can try to consolidate authentication services to using OAuth flows wherever possible. This document focuses on enabling the creation of OAuth 2 public clients, which would allow OAuth 2 based authentication in Synapse command line apps and third-party browser-based SPAs.
To securely support OAuth 2 public clients, these actions are needed (backfill this list with Jira tickets when confirmed):
Support PKCE in the authorization code flow
Add field to label OAuth 2 clients as either “public” or “confidential”; backfill existing clients as “confidential”
Public clients should not be issued secrets
Note: Refresh tokens become single-use bearer tokens.
Public clients should be required to use PKCE
Revoke the current iteration of a refresh token when an expired/used refresh token is used
Don’t save consent records for public OAuth clients
To fully support Synapse command line clients, in addition to the above, we must:
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Add a bootstrapped OAuth client for Synapse command line apps
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| Note |
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The initial purpose of the document was to identify OAuth 2 as a solution for replacing API keys in the command line clients. We determined that OAuth 2 is not a good fit for the command line clients, so design work for that issue has been moved to Personal Access Tokens. OAuth 2 public client implementation has not begun, as of the time of writing. This document still outlines requirements for OAuth 2 public clients, which may be worth implementing in the future. |
Summary
Using OAuth 2 to authenticate with Synapse has many benefits over using older authentication mechanisms. We can try to consolidate authentication services to using OAuth flows wherever possible. This document focuses on enabling the creation of OAuth 2 public clients, which would allow OAuth 2 based authentication in Synapse command line apps and third-party browser-based SPAs. Additionally, this will hasten the deprecation of API keys.
To securely support OAuth 2 public clients, these actions are needed:
Support PKCE in the authorization code flow:
Jira Legacy server System JIRA columns key,summary,type,created,updated,due,assignee,reporter,priority,status,resolution serverId ba6fb084-9827-3160-8067-8ac7470f78b2 key PLFM-6337 Add field to label OAuth 2 clients as either “public” or “confidential”; backfill existing clients as “confidential”:
Jira Legacy server System JIRA columns key,summary,type,created,updated,due,assignee,reporter,priority,status,resolution serverId ba6fb084-9827-3160-8067-8ac7470f78b2 key PLFM-6338 Public clients should not be issued secrets
Note: Refresh tokens become single-use bearer tokens.
Public clients should be required to use PKCE
Don’t save consent records for public OAuth clients
Revoke the current iteration of a refresh token when an expired/used refresh token is used:
Jira Legacy server System JIRA columns key,summary,type,created,updated,due,assignee,reporter,priority,status,resolution serverId ba6fb084-9827-3160-8067-8ac7470f78b2 key PLFM-6339
To fully support Synapse command line clients, in addition to the above, we must:
Add a bootstrapped OAuth client for Synapse command line apps:
Jira Legacy server System JIRA columns key,summary,type,created,updated,due,assignee,reporter,priority,status,resolution serverId ba6fb084-9827-3160-8067-8ac7470f78b2 key PLFM-6340 Add service to issue a (user-authenticated) refresh token for the Synapse command line apps OAuth client:
Jira Legacy server System JIRA columns key,summary,type,created,updated,due,assignee,reporter,priority,status,resolution serverId ba6fb084-9827-3160-8067-8ac7470f78b2 key PLFM-6341
Background
There are currently many ways to authenticate a request to Synapse, including
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Requirements/Notes/Considerations
Each point in this section will be fleshed out with reasoning, pros, cons, etc. and then consolidated once confident in what’s necessaryThis section contains an explanation of each requirement for supporting OAuth 2 public clients in Synapse. This section is summarized at the top of this document, and services are enumerated at the bottom of this document.
PKCE
Best practices suggest that authorization servers are required to support PKCE [2][3]. PKCE only provides benefits to public OAuth clients, since a malicious app must have knowledge of an OAuth client’s credentials to execute the attack.PKCE would require clients to generate a code and send a hash of the code to Synapse when initiating the authorization code OAuth flow. When redeeming the authorization code, the client must send the original code. Synapse would then hash the code and verify that the hash matches the initial hash sent by the client. to public OAuth clients, since a malicious app must have knowledge of an OAuth client’s credentials to execute the attack.
For more details, expand the following section:
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PKCE prevents a malicious application from hijacking an authorization code. This can occur when using a native app’s OAuth client, and the redirect URI is compromised by a malicious application observing traffic to the user agent (mobile app or web browser). In this scenario, the malicious app has the authorization code, and is in possession of the client’s credentials (if they exist), because it is a public client. Thus the malicious app now has access to the user’s account. With PKCE, the client generates a high-entropy random string, and calculates the SHA256 hash of the string. When making the initial authorization request, the hash is sent to the authorization server. The authorization server associates the hash with the authorization code, before sending it to the client (the hash may be embeddedembedded in the authorization code) When a client uses the authorization code, they must provide the initial random string. The authorization server computes the SHA256 hash of the string, and will only issue token(s) to the client if the hashes match. |
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The following would only apply to public OAuth clients because the refresh token acts as a bearer token. The goal is to reduce the risk and impact of token theft/replay attacks.
OAuth 2.1 ([2]) Note on refresh tokens for public clients:
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We will use refresh token rotation because it is partially implemented (we currently do not revoke an active token if an expired token is used). We can extend our implementation to include this the missing behavior.
Token binding is also more complicatedcomplicated, so we won’t use it. For details, expand the following section.
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Endpoint | Request Body | Response Body | Notes/Modifications | New Service? |
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OAuthClient extended to require a new field | ❌ | |||
None | Do not generate client secrets for public clients. | ❌ | ||
OIDCAuthorizationRequest extended to include | ❌ | |||
Multiple parameters | Additional request parameter | ❌ | ||
Multiple parameters | Client secret not required if the client ID is a public client. | ❌ | ||
Multiple parameters | If a public client uses an expired/rotated refresh token, revoke the current ‘version’ of the refresh token (e.g. refresh token is | ❌ | ||
- | - | Restrict client 0 from using these endpointsfrom using these endpoints (this is already the case, but it is unclear if it is explicit). | ❌ |
Support for first-party command line public clients
Command line apps (like the Synapse Python client) cannot always support the authorization code flow because some environments do not have a browser. To enable this, we must do at least one of the two:
Support another OAuth grant type (e.g.device_code)Add a user-authenticated service to generate an OAuth refresh token
A user-authenticated service is similar to the OAuth token generation service in GitHub, and is similiar to how users retrieve API keys today, so we will move forward with that.
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References
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