The Future of Authorization - OAuth2.1, GNAP, etc.

Thesis typeBachelor Thesis
SupervisorErwin Kupris
Starting dateAs soon as possible
SkillsLaTeX, Git, Any programming language
LanguageEnglish (preferred), German
Industry cooperationnot possible
Publish date2023-03-13

Problem and context

Identity and Access Management (IAM) has the goal to only allow the right entities to access the right resources at the right time and for the right reasons. Therefore, IAM handles everything surrounding digital identities and their usage. This includes, but is not limited to, concepts such as Identification, Authentication, Authorization, Federation, and Provisioning.

The de-facto standard protocol for authorization is OAuth 2.0. Over the years, many extensions, additional features, and security enhancements to OAuth were standardized. This resulted in a rather large and obfuscated set of standards. This is why OAuth 2.1 aims to consolidate the best practices and relevant standards for future implementations.

The Grant Negotiation and Authorization Protocol (GNAP) takes a different approach by building a completely new standard. The goal of the GNAP working group is to overcome limitations of OAuth and building on its best practices.

Both of these approaches are still under developement and not yet well researched.

Goals

The thesis can focus on a number of sub-topics, including, but not limited to:

Thesis proposals for adjacent topics are welcome. Get in touch if you have further questions.

Literature