Introducing Layer 7’s OAuth Toolkit

“If your tools don’t work for you, get rid of them,” is a simple creed I learned from my father in the workshop. Over the years, I have found it is just as relevant when applied to software, where virtual tools abound, but with often-dubious value.

OAuth is an emerging technology that has lately been in need of useful tools, and to fill this gap we are introducing an OAuth toolkit into Layer 7’s SecureSpan and CloudSpan Gateways.  OAuth isn’t exactly new to Layer 7; we have actually done a number of OAuth implementations with our customers over the last two years. But what we’ve discovered is that there is a lot of incompatibility between different OAuth implementations, and this is discouraging many organizations from making better use of this technology. Our goal with the toolkit was to provide a collection of intelligently parameterized components that developers can mix-and-match to reduce the friction between different implementations. And thanks to the generalization that characterize the emerging OAuth 2.0 specification, this toolkit helps to extend OAuth into interesting new use cases beyond the basic three-legged scenario of version one.

I have to admit that I was suspicious of OAuth when it first appeared a few years ago. So much effort had gone into the formal specification of SAML, from core definition to interop profiles, that I didn’t see the need for OAuth’s one use case solution and had little faith in the rigor of such a grass roots approach. But in time, OAuth won me over; it fits well with the browser-centric, simple-is-better approach of the modern Internet. The mapping to more generalized, token server-style interactions in the new version of the spec appeals to the architect in me, and the opening up of the security token payload indicates a desire to play well with existing infrastructure, which is a basic enterprise requirement.

However, adding extensibility to OAuth will also bring about this technology’s greatest challenge. The 1.0a specification benefitted enormously from laser focus on a use case so narrow that it was a wonder it gained the mindshare that it did. OAuth in 2011 has no such advantage—generalization being great for architects but hell for standards committees and vendors. It will be interesting to see how well the OAuth community satisfies the oftentimes-conflicting agendas of simple, standard, and interoperable.

Here at Layer 7 we predict a bright future for OAuth. We also think it’s very useful today, which is why we introduced a toolkit instead of a one-size-fits-one approach. We see our customers using OAuth in concert with their existing investments in Identity and Access Management (IAM) products, such as IBM’s Tivoli Access Manager  (TAM) or Microsoft’s Active Directory (AD). We see it being used to transport SAML tokens that require sophisticated interpretation to render entitlement decisions. Taking a cue from OAuth itself, the point of our toolkit is to simplify both implementation and integration. And the toolkit’s parameterization helps to insulate the application from specification change.

I’ll be at the Gartner/Burton Catalyst show this week in San Diego where we’ll be demonstrating the toolkit. I hope you can drop by and talk about how it might help you.