Comment by rtpg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rtpg | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Oh, thank you for reminding me of the well-known endpoint, was having trouble finding it in the OAuth RFCs but I wonder if it's pulled in elsewhere.

> They can't inject a token because you don't get the token from them, just the one time code.

that's not correct in the most common flow? The most common flow involves the user agent providing the information via a GET, so they can theoretically provide a token.

The reason the state parameter is important is because without it, a malicious actor can make a link that goes directly to your system's "oauth step finalized" step, but with their credentials. (Pedantic attack: service has slack push notifications integration, through OAuth. Attacker creates link like https : //service/connect-slack-finalize?token=token-to-attackers-slack that victim clicks on. Without using state, the service will just take the token and stick it into some slack integration. now attacker's slack is getting messages for the victim's account on the service. Cookies mean that the victim's thing is accepted immediately).

.well-known/openid-configuration is specified as part of OpenID Connect (OIDC) Discovery[1]. OIDC is separate from and on-top-of OAuth2. The OIDC specs come through the OpenID Foundation, not through the IETF (so not RFCs). (Also, while what they specify is super useful, they aren't nearly as well written as RFCs tend to be :) )

[1]: https://openid.net/specs/openid-connect-discovery-1_0.html

> that's not correct in the most common flow?

No, he's right, I was misremembering (assuming "the most common" flow is the "authorization code" flow specified in RFC 6749 §4.1). The user-agent provides a one-time "authorization code" to the client via a GET, and then the client receives that "authorization code" and does its own POST to the IDP to exchange that "authorization code" for the final "access token".

This is me misusing the word "token". Access tokens are gotten via POST, but the one-time code is gotten via GET and, absent usage of things like the state parameter, can easily lead to malicious attacks.

That's something that isn't OAuth2 or your end point is accepting something insane.

Are you talking about the PKCE variant of authorization code flow which is what replaces implicit flows in native apps and SPAs? Because those use code_challenge and code_verifier fields, not the state field. If you're doing all that in the state field with signed nonces you really should move to PKCE.

It's to prevent CSRF attacks. The attacker writes their own client and does half of a login on their own end (getting an authorization-code, but not yet exchanging it for an access-token), and then tricks the end-user to navigate to //service/connect-slack-finalize?code=<attackers-code>&state=<whatever>. But with the state parameter, the client can check the state parameter against a session cookie that it set previously, and say "wait a minute, this is the conclusion of a login from a different browser". Depending on what all session-state the client is keeping track of, it may make sense to sign that state-parameter-nonce to avoid having to remember session state server-side; but the simple case would be to just check whether it == a cookie value.

Using [0] as a reference, I'm talking about Step 3. This is, in my experience, the "normal" way that people are setting up OAuth between 2 services, with a user going through the flow.

[1] includes info on this (see "flawed CSRF protection")

[0]: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/an-introduc...

[1] https://portswigger.net/web-security/oauth

Aha! That makes sense! Yes that can be a problem. We exclusively use a single (our own) IdP so it's less important for us. But good to know as some future feature work will actually make this important.

Thanks!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com