Add Issuer Trust to Security Considerations#254
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Two non-normative bullets, both raised by @csarven on solid/specification#776 (solid/specification#776 (comment)): - Issuer trust is unconditional: a compromised / malicious / unavailable issuer can deny access, impersonate, or rewrite identity-related claims. - Many agents on a single issuer is a single point of failure: concentration risk grows with the issuer's user base.
jeswr
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Jun 3, 2026
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| * **Issuer trust is unconditional.** Every assertion of the user's identity comes from the issuer. | ||
| The user is fully reliant on it; a compromised, malicious, or unavailable issuer can deny access | ||
| to all of the user's data, impersonate the user, or selectively rewrite the WebID's | ||
| identity-related claims. A high degree of trust in the chosen issuer is therefore necessary. |
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| * **Issuer trust is unconditional.** Every assertion of the user's identity comes from the issuer. | |
| The user is fully reliant on it; a compromised, malicious, or unavailable issuer can deny access | |
| to all of the user's data, impersonate the user, or selectively rewrite the WebID's | |
| identity-related claims. A high degree of trust in the chosen issuer is therefore necessary. | |
| * **Identity Provider trust.** Every assertion of the user's identity comes from the identity provider. | |
| The user is fully reliant on it; a compromised, malicious, or unavailable identity provider can deny access | |
| to all of the user's data, impersonate the user, or selectively rewrite the WebID's | |
| identity-related claims. A high degree of trust in the chosen identity provider is therefore necessary. |
jeswr
commented
Jun 3, 2026
| The user is fully reliant on it; a compromised, malicious, or unavailable issuer can deny access | ||
| to all of the user's data, impersonate the user, or selectively rewrite the WebID's | ||
| identity-related claims. A high degree of trust in the chosen issuer is therefore necessary. | ||
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| The authorization server has to choose to trust the identity provider selected by the user before granting access. This choice may be to delegate the choice completely to users, or to restrict the set of identity providers to a specific trust list. |
jeswr
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Jun 3, 2026
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| * **Many agents on a single issuer is a single point of failure.** Where many agents share a single | ||
| issuer, that issuer is a concentration point: a single compromise, outage, or service-level | ||
| decision affects every agent that depends on it. Attacks tend to focus on major centralisations, | ||
| so concentration risk grows with the issuer's user base. Implementations offering accounts under | ||
| a shared issuer should plan for this risk. |
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| * **Many agents on a single issuer is a single point of failure.** Where many agents share a single | |
| issuer, that issuer is a concentration point: a single compromise, outage, or service-level | |
| decision affects every agent that depends on it. Attacks tend to focus on major centralisations, | |
| so concentration risk grows with the issuer's user base. Implementations offering accounts under | |
| a shared issuer should plan for this risk. | |
| * **The identity provider service is an point of failure.** Identity provider(s) are required to attest an agents identity. Not all authentication methods require an identity provider service, this is a specific requirement of Solid-OIDC. | |
| Agents may have multiple identity providers. Having multiple identity providers can provide redundancy in the event of an outage of one identity provider service. The trade-off is that this increases the attack surface of malicious identity providers. | |
| Where many agents share a single identity provider, that identity provider is a concentration point: a single compromise, outage, or service-level decision affects every agent that depends on it. Attacks tend to focus on major centralisations, so concentration risk grows with the issuer's user base. Implementations offering accounts under a shared issuer should plan for this risk. |
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The change is small — see the diff. Bikeshed-rendered preview is not currently available for feature branches (the CI build only publishes from
main).Summary
Adds a new non-normative subsection
Issuer Trustto § Security Considerations (after § Client Trust), covering two issuer-side considerations that the current text does not surface:Source
Both points were raised by @csarven on solid/specification#776. Surfacing them upstream here as the appropriate home for OIDC-specific Security and Privacy Considerations.
Test plan
bikeshed spec(or the project's equivalent) builds without errors.# Security Considerations # {#security}shows the new## Issuer Trust ## {#security-issuer-trust}subsection between Client Trust and Privacy Considerations.#security-issuer-trustresolves.