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Zero-Touch OAuth for MCP
51–60 of 124 posts
Re: Zero-Touch OAuth for MCP
#52Read it multiple times, its definitely useful, centralizes the audit and access in one place (with IDP). The IDP can very well act as a proxy API gateway taking care of token exchange when required instead of putting the onus on Client. Thats another approach which has been adopted by some other players in this domain.
On a personal level, what I felt bit uncomfortable with is this idea of access being delegated on my behalf by IDP to client without making me aware about it. May be I am too used to the concept of user presence in the flows that happens on browser. This it evolving more towards centralizing the access for the machines.
Given in the enterprise environment the identity really belongs to the company instead of individual, its probably acceptable.
How its gets incorporated in customer identity is altogether a different challenge. Its probably not possible to have this kind of trust between IDP, client and the resource authorization server.
Re: Zero-Touch OAuth for MCP
#53Read it multiple times, its definitely useful, centralizes the audit and access in one place (with IDP). The IDP can very well act as a proxy API gateway taking care of token exchange when required instead of putting the onus on Client. Thats another approach which has been adopted by some other players in this domain. On a personal level, what I felt bit uncomfortable with is this idea of access being delegated on m…
There's theoretically nothing really stopping this integration from working in the consumer space - you just need to establish a trust relationship (e.g., if I am logged in with GitHub, also log me in to Sentry automatically). There is more work ahead here, but as you said - the most obvious _current_ use-case is enterprises, where admins do not want individual employees clicking around picking random credentials they have.
Re: Zero-Touch OAuth for MCP
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think so. The article is all about reducing friction. Suppose I start a conversation and enter some highly third-party-prompt-injectable request, perhaps "Fork github.com/some_third_party/coolproject and submit a PR to do such-and-such." That repo injects a prompt that attempts to do a tool call to steal all my money. If I indeed have a bank MCP configured, I absolutely want to be prompted! Now I realize it's…
There's some active discussions on task level authz and multi-hop delegation in the OAuth WG right now. WorkOS wrote a good overview of the open drafts [1]. (Disclosure: one of them is mine.) [1] https://workos.com/blog/oauth-multi-hop-delegation-ai-agents
I skimmed that. It seems to me:
(a) A major problem where one agent can give dangerous instructions to another.
(b) A desire for an “agent” to cleanly delegate permissions to another “agent”. I am extremely unclear as to what an “agent” is in this context. Is one’s OpenAI or Anthropic account an “agent”? How is (b) related to (a)?
(c) An observation that existing OAuth + JWT can’t really do (b) and that a new spec could allow delegation.
ISTM:
- (a)’s root cause is a complete lack of control on the portions of a repository that are interpreted by various tools in a trusted/privileged manner.
- (b) could be addressed by a capability or proxy system.
- Most services that offer OAuth or other types of API keys have absurdly coarse-grained permissions. GitHub’s OAuth cannot obviously even restrict to a particular organization, let alone a repository, and good luck blocking commits to .github. Cloudflare can’t restrict DNS operations to a particular host. A shocking number of major services have no concept of non-human accounts. The list goes on. Delegation is of dubious value in this setting.
- Why would one ever want to give a bearer token to an “agent”?
- Wouldn’t a proxy serve this purpose more flexibly and more universally?
Re: Zero-Touch OAuth for MCP
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't that what's solved by this method? Your SSO provider (e.g. Okta) is now what gates each employee's resource access for different MCP resources.
I don't think so. The article is all about reducing friction. Suppose I start a conversation and enter some highly third-party-prompt-injectable request, perhaps "Fork github.com/some_third_party/coolproject and submit a PR to do such-and-such." That repo injects a prompt that attempts to do a tool call to steal all my money. If I indeed have a bank MCP configured, I absolutely want to be prompted! Now I realize it's…
The key here is the separation of target segment for this. Enterprise identities (you being an employee) are the target for this not the consumer identity (personal account). When you are an employee then the sensitivity and security of your account can be managed by your employer.
Other way to look it is that as an employee you will not be able to connect to any MCP server anymore unless its configured in your IDP.
Re: Zero-Touch OAuth for MCP
#56Oh wow - seeing my own work in the wild is ... wild. I implemented the RAS end of this for Atlassian. There will certainly be iterations around this flow - CIMD, better tenancy support, etc., but all the folks involved in delivering this at Anthropic, Okta, and here at Atlassian were fantastic.
Was great collaborating with you and your team on this!
Re: Zero-Touch OAuth for MCP
#57I don't quite understand the advantage of this over regular oauth. I think I need an example comparison of the authz flows.
Advantage is user has no control/is not needed to consent about what apps they're authorizing to share their information between each other, bacause the decision to delegate access is at the IdP policy level. User many never know which apps/services were authorized to share their information. Wait, is that an advantage? ;-)
For your employee account yes its an advantage, and thats the target. Your personal account will still require consents.
Re: Zero-Touch OAuth for MCP
#58Before you get too far into the usual “MCP is dead, Skills forever” debate The real valuable capability MCP offers over skills/CLI is isolating the auth flow outside of the agent’s context window, and potentially out of the harness completely. This is valuable from a security perspective obviously. It’s also just a much easier user experience for normies and large businesses adopting AI tools. I hear all the context…
> The real valuable capability MCP offers over skills/CLI is The real lesson is that MCP vs skills is not a binary. They are simply different tools. Each may or may not be better given different requirements. Which is better, a knife or a saw?
There’s even a skills over MCP WG; and I typically deliver skills via tools in my MCPs intentionally. I find Claude and codex recall of skills via MCP tools to actually be higher than skills themselves, which I feel have an (unmeasured) less than 30% recall rate. I have to typically force skills to be loaded explicitly through / or $ depending on the flavor and skill graphs are very unreliable.
Re: Zero-Touch OAuth for MCP
#59Oh wow - seeing my own work in the wild is ... wild. I implemented the RAS end of this for Atlassian. There will certainly be iterations around this flow - CIMD, better tenancy support, etc., but all the folks involved in delivering this at Anthropic, Okta, and here at Atlassian were fantastic.
Was great collaborating with you and your team on this!
Same!
Re: Zero-Touch OAuth for MCP
#60Read it multiple times, its definitely useful, centralizes the audit and access in one place (with IDP). The IDP can very well act as a proxy API gateway taking care of token exchange when required instead of putting the onus on Client. Thats another approach which has been adopted by some other players in this domain. On a personal level, what I felt bit uncomfortable with is this idea of access being delegated on m…
There's theoretically nothing really stopping this integration from working in the consumer space - you just need to establish a trust relationship (e.g., if I am logged in with GitHub, also log me in to Sentry automatically). There is more work ahead here, but as you said - the most obvious _current_ use-case is enterprises, where admins do not want individual employees clicking around picking random credentials the…
At the end of the day its wiring the flows to serve a purpose and can be wired in multiple ways. Some combination of client, IDP and resource server can come together to form a band and may provide this for consumer identity.
Reasons why this is a bad idea for consumer identity -
1. In Enterprise, the IDP is the single owner for the identity, so it essentially can do represent the user uniquely and sort of pretty much do anything it wishes for (includes deleting the identity)
2. In enterprise the IDP is the single authentication factor used by the downstream resource server (application), in other words the application just trusts the assertion
3. For consumer identity, the resource server owns the identity/user explicitly. Github may be one of the authentication factors that the user can use, but it may not be the only one.
4. For consumer identity, Github cannot delete the user account in downstream application.
Regardless, this protocol is going to create friction in adoption of new AI agents and MCP servers, to sell to enterprise they have to implement this and integrate with existing IDP's and resource servers. Using any new MCP server would require full evaluation lifecycle from security perspective. Its a good thing but its going to hurt the new players pretty bad in terms of adoption and discovery.