Subject: [OAUTH-WG] Draft 16 comment

From: Shane B Weeden <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 23 May 2011 14:40:22 +1000

First, I'd like to add my support for Brian Eaton's comments on Draft 16.
They actually helped clarify the comment I have below....

I found section 9 to be in contradiction to a part of section 6. In
particular in section 9:

 Native applications SHOULD use the authorization code grant type flow
 without client password credentials (due to their inability to keep
 the credentials confidential) to obtain short-lived access tokens,
 and use refresh tokens to maintain access.

In section 6 the specification is quite clear that client authentication is
REQUIRED for the use of refresh tokens:

   The authorization server MUST validate the client credentials, ensure
   that the refresh token was issued to the authenticated client,
   validate the refresh token, and verify that the resource owner's
   authorization is still valid.

My  understanding is that refresh tokens are being used as a kind of
long-lived, rolling "instance secret" for the native application and
represent the grant authorized by the end user during initial establishment
of the authorization code which is used to get the first refresh token.

It seems to me this use case needs to be allowed for in the wording of
section 6.

Regards,
Shane.