MicroProfile JWT RBAC proposal in progress http://[] ## Introduction This specification outlines a proposal for using OpenID Connect(OIDC) based JSON Web Tokens(JWT) for role based access control(RBAC) of microservice endpoints.
MicroProfile 1.1 is a baseline platform definition that optimizes Enterprise Java for a microservices architecture and delivers application portability across multiple MicroProfile runtimes. While Java EE is a very feature rich platform and is like a toolbox that can be used to to address a wide variety of application architectures, MicroProfile focuses on defining a small and a minimum set of Java EE standards that can be used to deliver applications based on a microservice architecture, they are:
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JAX-RS
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CDI
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JSON-P
The security requirements that involve microservice architectures are strongly related with RESTful Security. In a RESTful architecture style, services are usually stateless and any security state associated with a client is sent to the target service on every request in order to allow services to re-create a security context for the caller and perform both authentication and authorization checks.
One of the main strategies to propagate the security state from clients to services or even from services to services involves the use of security tokens. In fact, the main security protocols in use today are based on security tokens such as OAuth2, OpenID Connect, SAML, WS-Trust, WS-Federation and others. While some of these standards are more related with identity federation, they share a common concept regarding security tokens and token based authentication.
For RESTful based microservices, security tokens offer a very lightweight and interoperable way to propagate identities across different services, where:
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Services don’t need to store any state about clients or users
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Services can verify the token validity if token follows a well known format. Otherwise, services may invoke a separated service.
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Services can identify the caller by introspecting the token. If the token follows a well known format, services are capable to introspect the token by themselves, locally. Otherwise, services may invoke a separated service.
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Services can enforce authorization policies based on any information within a security token
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Support for both delegation and impersonation of identities
Today, the most common solutions involving RESTful and microservices security are based on OAuth2, OpenID Connect and JSON Web Token (JWT) standards.