OAuth setup simplification

[thekid]

Currently, this is the typical code setup inside a web applications' routes() method:

use web\auth\SessionBased;
use web\auth\oauth\{OAuth2Flow, BySecret};

$flow= new OAuth2Flow(
  'http://localhost:8443/oauth/common/authorize',
  'http://localhost:8443/oauth/common/token',
  new BySecret('613aacd1f95ce7ee1b04', '...'),
  '/',
  ['user'],
);
$auth= new SessionBased($flow, $sessions, function($client) use($users) {
  $me= $client->fetch('http://localhost:8443/graph/me')->value();
  return $users->upsert([
    'handle' => $me['id'],
    'name'   => $me['name'],
    // continues mapping fields, shortened for brevity
  ]);
});

return ['/' => $auth->required($frontend)];

If I want to make this configurable and integrate well with several services, there's a lot to do:

• 2 separate URLs for authorize and token endpoints
• Another one to choose between the credentials using BySecret (client ID and secret) or ByCertificate (client ID, thumbprint and certificate)
• Depending on the above, 2 or 3 more configuration values for the credentials
• An additional one for the scopes
• Another one for the userinfo endpoint
• ...and finally something to map the fields returned by this userinfo endpoint

👉 This boils down to almost 10 configuration options that have to be set in order to get an OAuth workflow running!

[thekid]

OIDC aims at simplifying this by adding all these (and some more options) to a configuration file to a well known location, see https://openid.net/specs/openid-connect-discovery-1_0.html#ProviderConfig

Examples

• https://login.windows.net/common/.well-known/openid-configuration
• https://accounts.google.com/.well-known/openid-configuration
• https://www.facebook.com/.well-known/openid-configuration/

Implementation

Given that, we could provide an API such as the following:

use web\auth\SessionBased;
use web\auth\oauth\Provider;

$oidc= new Provider(
  'https://login.windows.net/common/',
  new BySecret('613aacd1f95ce7ee1b04', '...'),
);
$auth= new SessionBased($oidc->flow(), $sessions, function($user) {
  // Potentially include user field mapping logic...
  return $users->upsert($user);
});

...which would the mean only having to configure 1 URL instead of 3.

Caveat

However, not all sites support this configuration, e.g. GitHub, see https://stackoverflow.com/questions/52157568/what-is-github-well-known-openid-configuration-url

[thekid]

Another potential for compressing this is introducing a specialized OAuth URI:

Syntax

"<scheme>://<client-id>:<secret>@<host>[:<port>]/<common-path>/{authorize,token}?<params>"

Examples

• GitHub: https://613aacd1f95ce7ee1b0f:[email protected]/login/oauth/{authorize,access_token}?scope=user
• O365: https://b105d05c-6952-444b-84c0-53487c2ca24f:[email protected]/ee920d54-46e4-4e1e-aa99-6d010a689325/oauth2/v2.0/{authorize,token}?scope=openid,User.Read
• Facebook: https://70051176497917f:[email protected]/v18.0/oauth/{authorize,access_token}?scope=public_profile,email

Caveats

This breaks for Facebook when using https://www.facebook.com/v18.0/dialog/oauth as authorization endpoint and https://graph.facebook.com/v18.0/oauth/access_token as token endpoint as documented here. As seen above, this does not need to be a problem, but requires extra cognitive load for developers!

[thekid]

Other libraries such as The PHPLeague OAuth client go down the road of encapsulating these well-known URLs inside implementing classes, see e.g. https://github.com/thephpleague/oauth2-facebook/blob/main/src/Provider/Facebook.php. This leads to hundreds of small libraries like the ones listed on their third-party page, with the problem of them becoming outdated quickly.

[thekid]

Fetching the user info is a small improvement to the API, see #27:

- use web\auth\{AuthenticationError, SessionBased};
+ use web\auth\SessionBased;
  use web\auth\oauth\OAuth2Flow;

  $flow= new OAuth2Flow(/* shortened for brevity */);
- $auth= new SessionBased($flow, $sessions, function($client) {
-   $res= $client->fetch('https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/me');
-   if ($res->status() >= 400) throw new AuthenticationError('Unexpected status '.$res->status());
-   return $res->value();
- });
+ $auth= new SessionBased($flow, $sessions, $flow->fetchUser('https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/me'));

[thekid]

For an example, see thekid/crews#3