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Comment by x401throaway | Hacker News Reader

I work at Proof, and we're working on x401 as a means for agentic authorization

https://x401.proof.com/spec/latest/#abstract

in a nutshell:

* a website that wants to authorize who you are (say, to book a flight or sign a waiver for go kart rental)

* the endpoint returns 401 and defines in a header what info it needs about you (over 18? you're actually John Doe? etc.)

on the proof side specifically, we're putting IAL2 verification in front of this https://pages.nist.gov/800-63-3-Implementation-Resources/63A...

pretty cool stuff, its early days but its a strong way to ensure there's a human authorizing sensitive actions an agent is taking on your behalf

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Uh, not sure I agree with your terminology - one does not authorize who you are. You authenticate yourself, certain tokens authenticate your identity with varying levels of strength (e.g. within a corporate enclave, you may have elevated authorizations if you are authenticating from a corporate device).

Authorizations are what are granted to an authenticated identity, typically with a specified scope and duration.

thank you for the clarification - thankfully some much smarter people than I are working on the protocol aspects :)

when I say `authorize who you are` I mean to say that you're saying both "hello I am in fact john doe" and "john doe the human is also saying this is ok to do".

I think this is interesting in the lens of Muse, GrokBot, Dots, OpenClaw, etc; if my agent wanted to rent a car on my behalf, it would forcibly have to get approval from me to do so

Authentication is (proving) who you are.

Authorization is the process of determining if someone can do something.

That you’re conflating multiple distinct concerns doesn’t build confidence.

Good point. Identity is not the same thing as authority. We're working on the authority piece at tenuo.ai (with a corresponding IETF protocol effort)

Maybe related. I was always confused with the authorization header and 401 status code (unauthorized).

I've only ever seen authorization header containing credentials (i.e. authentication, who you are) instead of authorization (what you can do).

Also everyone returns 401 when unauthorized (i.e. can't do a thing), instead of 403 (forbidden, i.e. can't do the thing). When 401 should probably be "unauthenticated" (we don't know who you are, so we can't authorize you).

Always messes with my head a bit.

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