| Internet-Draft | OAuth Mission Expansion | August 2026 |
| McGuinness | Expires 11 February 2027 | [Page] |
Mission-Bound Authorization for OAuth 2.0 commits a Mission's
authority at a single approval event and defers widening: enlarging
authority requires a new approval, a successor Mission. This document
defines that successor mechanism as an optional, layered extension to
the issuance profile. When an action falls outside an active Mission's
Authority Set but the deployment's governance policy permits widening,
a client initiates expansion: it submits a new Mission Intent through
Pushed Authorization Requests, bound to the predecessor Mission's
grant, and a fresh approval event records a successor Mission. The
successor carries a predecessor member on its mission claim
linking it to the Mission it replaces; on the successor's first
redemption it activates and the predecessor enters a terminal
superseded state, so an unredeemed code leaves the predecessor
active. Expansion never
widens authority without a new consent: the successor's authority
comes only from its own approval. A deployment that never expands a
Mission is unaffected by this document.¶
This note is to be removed before publishing as an RFC.¶
The latest revision of this draft can be found at https://mcguinness.github.io/mission-bound-authorization/draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-expansion.html. Status information for this document may be found at https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-expansion/.¶
Source for this draft and an issue tracker can be found at https://github.com/mcguinness/mission-bound-authorization.¶
This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.¶
Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-Drafts. The list of current Internet-Drafts is at https://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/.¶
Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."¶
This Internet-Draft will expire on 11 February 2027.¶
Copyright (c) 2026 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the document authors. All rights reserved.¶
This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal Provisions Relating to IETF Documents (https://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of publication of this document. Please review these documents carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect to this document. Code Components extracted from this document must include Revised BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as described in the Revised BSD License.¶
Mission-Bound Authorization for OAuth 2.0 [I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission] (the "issuance profile") makes a Mission a first-class OAuth artifact: a structured, human-approved, integrity-bound task whose authority bounds and outlives every token an agent derives. It commits the Authority Set once, at the approval event, and deliberately defines no mid-stream authorization upgrade. As that profile states, widening authority requires a new approval, a successor Mission, as specified by this companion profile.¶
This document is that successor mechanism. A task an agent pursues does not always stay within the authority approved for it: the agent encounters an action the approved Authority Set does not cover, yet one the deployment's governance policy would permit under a fresh consent. Expansion is the governed path from that shortfall to a new approval. It does not patch or widen the existing Mission; it creates a new Mission, through the issuance profile's own flow, linked to the one it replaces.¶
The mechanism reuses the issuance profile end to end. An expansion is
a new Mission Intent submitted through Pushed Authorization Requests
([RFC9126]), bound to the predecessor Mission's grant, leading to a
fresh approval event ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission]) with its
own intent_hash, authority_hash, and Mission record. The
successor's authority comes only from that approval. This document
adds exactly three things on top of the issuance profile: a way to
bind an expansion request to the predecessor it expands; a
predecessor lineage member on the resulting Mission; and a terminal
superseded predecessor state with the reconciliation rules that keep
concurrent expansions consistent.¶
This document is optional. It is a layered extension to the issuance
profile, not a change to it. A deployment that implements
[I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission] and never expands a Mission is
fully conformant to that profile and is unaffected by this document:
it issues no expansion request, records no predecessor member, and
never enters the superseded state this document introduces. The
issuance profile's lifecycle (active, revoked, expired) is
complete without expansion; the superseded state defined here
(Section 7) is relevant only when expansion is used.¶
A Mission Issuer claims conformance to this document only when it adjudicates expansion; otherwise it remains a plain issuance-profile Mission Issuer. Nothing here places a new requirement back on the issuance profile.¶
This document depends normatively on the issuance profile and is not
implementable alone. It reuses, without restating, that profile's
Mission Intent, submission via PAR, authority
derivation, approval event with its integrity anchors, Mission record,
the mission claim, the subset rule, and the lifecycle and issuance
gating. It uses the terms Agent (Client), Subject, Approver, Mission
Issuer, Mission Intent, Authority Set, Mission, and derived token as
defined there.¶
Where this document refers to "the issuance profile" without a section, it means [I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission] as a whole.¶
This document defines:¶
the expansion request: how a client initiates a successor Mission and how that request is bound to the predecessor's grant (Section 4);¶
the predecessor lineage member on the successor's mission claim
and Mission record (Section 6);¶
the terminal superseded predecessor state and its transition
(Section 7);¶
replacement expansion as the mode, with branch expansion deferred (Section 8);¶
concurrent-expansion reconciliation, with a closed set of reconciliation status codes (Section 9); and¶
the expansion denial reasons (Section 10).¶
This document does NOT define:¶
a way to widen an existing Mission in place; expansion always creates a new Mission;¶
runtime per-action enforcement or the classification of a denial as expansion-eligible; that is the runtime layer's concern (Section 3.2, [I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-runtime]);¶
branch expansion, in which predecessor and successor both remain active (Section 8);¶
multi-hop or cross-domain expansion; an expansion is adjudicated by
the predecessor's Mission Issuer (its issuer); or¶
policy-adjudicated expansion within a pre-consented authority ceiling; that is progressive authorization, defined by an experimental companion ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-progressive]). Under this document alone, every expansion is adjudicated by a fresh human approval.¶
The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "NOT RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in BCP 14 [RFC2119] [RFC8174] when, and only when, they appear in all capitals, as shown here.¶
All JSON shown in this document is non-normative and illustrative; the member definitions in the surrounding text are authoritative.¶
The following terms apply in addition to those inherited from the issuance profile (Section 1.2).¶
The active Mission an expansion enlarges. It is the baseline for the
successor and is referenced by the successor's mission.predecessor
member (Section 6).¶
The Mission a replacement expansion creates through a fresh approval
event. It carries its own Authority Set, integrity anchors, and
mission_id, and a predecessor member linking it to the
predecessor (Section 6).¶
A Mission Intent submitted via PAR, bound to a predecessor Mission's grant, that asks the Mission Issuer to adjudicate a successor (Section 4).¶
Agent (client) Mission Issuer (AS)
| |
| denied: action outside |
| active Mission's authority |
| |
| 1. PAR: mission_intent + | resolve predecessor
| predecessor grant -----> | from the grant;
| <----- request_uri ----- | gate predecessor active
| |
| 2. authorization request ->| fresh consent for the
| | broader authority;
| <-------- code --------- | predecessor stays active
| |
| 3. token request --------> | first redemption:
| (redeem code) | -> successor active
| | -> predecessor
| | superseded (atomic)
| <----- access token ---- | (mission.predecessor set)
v
¶
The shape is the issuance profile's own creation flow
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission]), with one addition at step 1:
the request is bound to the predecessor Mission's grant, so the
Mission Issuer adjudicates a successor of a specific predecessor rather
than an unrelated new Mission. The fresh consent at step 2 is what
supplies the broader authority; the successor's authority comes only
from this approval. Supersession is deferred to step 3: the successor
activates and the predecessor becomes superseded atomically at the
first redemption of the successor's authorization code, so an
unredeemed or expired code leaves the predecessor active
(Section 7).¶
A client initiates expansion after an action is denied because the requested authority is outside the active Mission's Authority Set and the deployment's governance policy permits widening it. This document does not define how a denial is classified as expansion-eligible; that classification belongs to the component that denies the action.¶
A Mission-aware Resource Server enforces the token's authority statelessly and refuses an out-of-bounds action with its usual insufficient-authority error ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission]). The runtime enforcement profile [I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-runtime] is one source of an expansion-eligible denial: in that profile a deny is terminal for the attempted action, and the authority-expandable-denial escalation that turns such a deny into an expansion is named there as out of scope. This document defines that expansion. This document does not require any particular denial source: a client that knows, by any means, that an action needs authority the active Mission lacks MAY initiate expansion. Whether the Mission Issuer adjudicates a successor remains its decision (Section 5); an eligible denial is not an authorization in favor of expansion.¶
Expansion is a governance operation. It is distinct from
authentication step-up [RFC9470]. A request denied because an acr
or amr constraint requires fresh authentication is satisfied by
step-up, not by expansion: the Authority Set does not change. A
request denied because the requested authority is not in the active
Mission's Authority Set requires expansion: the Authority Set must be
enlarged through a new approval event. The two are not interchangeable;
Section 13.4 treats the security consequence of conflating
them.¶
An expansion request is an ordinary Mission creation request under the issuance profile, with one added binding to the predecessor.¶
A client initiates an expansion exactly as it creates any Mission: it
submits a Mission Intent through a Pushed Authorization Request
([RFC9126]) using the mission_intent request parameter, per
[I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission]. The Mission Intent describes
the broadened task: it carries the goal, resources, constraints,
and controls the successor needs, including the authority the denied
action required. The Mission Issuer derives the successor's Authority
Set from this Intent and bounds it by policy exactly as for any
Mission; this document adds no authority-derivation rule.¶
To mark the request as an expansion, the client additionally supplies
the predecessor request parameter:¶
predecessor:REQUIRED for an expansion request. A string. The mission_id of the
predecessor Mission the successor expands. Its presence signals that
this Mission creation is an expansion and names the predecessor whose
mission.predecessor lineage member and superseded transition the
Mission Issuer applies. It names the predecessor for cross-checking
and audit; it does not by itself select or authorize one (the grant
does, Section 4.3).¶
predecessor_assertion:REQUIRED for an expansion request. A string. A Mission relationship
assertion (Section 4.2) proving that the requester
controls the predecessor's grant, without presenting the
predecessor's refresh token. The Mission Issuer resolves the
predecessor from the assertion's mission_id and binds the expansion
to it (Section 4.3); this value, not predecessor, selects
the predecessor authoritatively. A refresh token MUST NOT be accepted
in this parameter; an AS MUST refuse a predecessor_assertion value
that does not parse as the assertion of Section 4.2
with invalid_request.¶
Both parameters are carried through PAR with mission_intent. Like
mission_intent, an AS MUST reject a predecessor or
predecessor_assertion value presented directly on a front-channel
authorization request rather than through a PAR-issued request_uri
with invalid_request. predecessor_assertion is short-lived and
single-use (Section 4.2); it is nonetheless restricted
to the PAR back channel, consistent with predecessor and
mission_intent, so no expansion-binding parameter appears on a front
channel.¶
The predecessor parameter names the predecessor but does not
by itself authorize expanding it. Authorization comes from the grant
binding of Section 4.3: a client MUST NOT be able to expand a
Mission merely by naming its mission_id.¶
A Mission relationship assertion proves that the requester holds the
predecessor Mission's grant and authorizes one relationship operation,
without presenting the predecessor's refresh token. This is the
predecessor_assertion artifact of Section 4.1. It is a family-native
artifact, not a foreign mechanism: it composes the JWT-bearer assertion
already used to redeem a Mission grant ([RFC7523], the Mission
Issuance Grant of [I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-issuance-grant])
with the short-lived, single-use, sender-constrained discipline the
Identity Continuation Assertion already applies to a subject token
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-id-continuation-assertion]). It differs
from both: unlike a Mission Issuance Grant, the Mission Issuer is the
verifier, not the signer; unlike a DPoP proof ([RFC9449]), its claims
name a Mission and an operation, not an HTTP request.¶
A Mission relationship assertion is a JWT [RFC7519] signed as a JWS
[RFC7515] by the requester, using the same key confirmed by the
named Mission's cnf (below). Claims:¶
iss, sub:REQUIRED. Identical values naming the requester: the predecessor or
parent Mission's recorded client_id, or, where a distinct actor is
authorized to act for it, that actor's identifier under the
issuance profile's actor vocabulary
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission]). A self-issued assertion
sets iss and sub to the same value, as an [RFC7523] client
assertion does.¶
aud:REQUIRED. The Mission Issuer's PAR endpoint. The Mission Issuer MUST
reject an assertion whose aud does not name it.¶
iat, exp:REQUIRED. The assertion MUST NOT be valid longer than 300 seconds
(exp minus iat), matching the family's other short-lived
assertions ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-issuance-grant],
[I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-id-continuation-assertion]).¶
jti:REQUIRED. Unique per assertion; single-use, checked as described below.¶
mission_id:REQUIRED. The mission_id of the predecessor Mission (expansion) or
parent Mission (child creation). This value, not a request parameter
alongside the assertion, selects the Mission authoritatively.¶
mission_operation:REQUIRED. The relationship operation the assertion authorizes: a
string from a closed set each consuming profile extends by
specification, matching the shared mission_denial_reason member's
extension pattern (Section 10). This document defines
mission-expansion. The child delegation profile defines
mission-child-creation in the same member
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-child-delegation]). A Mission
Issuer MUST reject an assertion whose mission_operation does not
match the operation being requested.¶
An illustrative decoded assertion, for the worked example's predecessor:¶
{
"iss": "s6BhdRkqt3",
"sub": "s6BhdRkqt3",
"aud": "https://as.example.com",
"iat": 1793607000,
"exp": 1793607180,
"jti": "rla_4mK7pQ2xV9rT6nL1sB",
"mission_id": "msn_8RfX2Lqv9TqMv4z7sA2bN1k0YpEdHc9-",
"mission_operation": "mission-expansion"
}
¶
The assertion MUST be sender-constrained to the key confirmed by the
named Mission's cnf: the sender constraint the issuance profile
records for the predecessor or parent Mission's refresh token
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission]). No bearer form of the
assertion exists; a Mission with no sender-constrained credential to
bind to has no key to verify against and cannot be expanded through
this binding, exactly as when it has no refresh token to present
(Section 4.3).¶
The requester proves possession of that key according to the
mechanism the predecessor's or parent's cnf names, matching the
issuance profile's DPoP and mTLS conventions:¶
when cnf carries jkt (DPoP [RFC9449]), the assertion's JOSE
header MUST embed the confirmed public key as jwk, as an
[RFC9449] DPoP proof does, and the JWS signature MUST verify under
that key; the embedded key's thumbprint is the value checked against
cnf.jkt below;¶
when cnf carries x5t#S256 (mTLS [RFC8705]), the assertion MUST
be presented over the mutual-TLS connection whose client certificate
thumbprint equals cnf.x5t#S256; the connection, not the JWS
signature, is the possession proof.¶
Client authentication at the PAR endpoint and the assertion's sender-constraint are independent checks: client authentication (where the client is confidential) establishes who is asking; the assertion establishes that the requester holds the named Mission's own credential. Neither substitutes for the other, and a public client's expansion or child creation rests solely on the latter.¶
On receiving a Mission relationship assertion, the Mission Issuer MUST,
in order, refusing with invalid_grant on any failure below unless
noted otherwise:¶
Parse the assertion as a JWT; a value that does not parse, or is a
refresh token, MUST be refused with invalid_request
(Section 4.1).¶
Resolve the named Mission from mission_id; an unresolvable
mission_id MUST be refused with invalid_grant.¶
Verify the JWS signature against the key confirmed by that
Mission's own recorded cnf, per Section 4.2.1.
The Mission named in mission_id fixes which Mission's cnf
applies; a signature valid under a different Mission's key MUST NOT
satisfy this check.¶
Verify aud names this Mission Issuer.¶
Verify iat and exp are valid, exp follows iat, the assertion
is unexpired, and its lifetime does not exceed 300 seconds.¶
Verify jti has not been seen for this Mission Issuer; record it as
seen until exp. A repeated jti MUST be refused.¶
Verify the named Mission is active.¶
Verify mission_operation matches the operation requested and that
the requester (iss/sub) is the party authorized for that
operation on the named Mission: the Mission's own recorded
client_id, or an actor the Mission's Authority Set names as
authorized to act for it. A requester that is neither MUST be
refused with invalid_grant.¶
Steps 3 through 8 mirror the verification already required of the
Identity Continuation Assertion's subject token
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-id-continuation-assertion]): signature
against a confirmed key, audience, lifetime, single-use jti, and
liveness of the named grant, applied here to a Mission instead of an
identity-continuation handle. A Mission Issuer that already implements
that verification for another assertion in this family reuses the same
routine.¶
The issuance profile binds a Mission to the authorization grant the
Mission Issuer issues, and resolves the Mission from the grant the
client presents, never from a client-supplied mission_id
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission], grant binding). An expansion
request MUST be bound to the predecessor's grant the same way.¶
Because expansion runs as an interactive approval event, a PAR submission followed by an authorization-code flow (Section 5), the binding is established at the PAR submission, a back-channel request. The binding procedure is:¶
In the same PAR request that carries mission_intent and
predecessor, the client MUST present a Mission relationship
assertion naming the predecessor and the mission-expansion
operation in the predecessor_assertion parameter (Section 4.1,
Section 4.2).¶
The expansion MUST rest on the assertion's sender-constraint proof of control over the predecessor's grant (Section 4.2.1), required unconditionally of every client. A confidential client additionally authenticates to the PAR endpoint; that authentication establishes who is asking and does not substitute for the assertion's proof of what they hold (Section 4.2.1).¶
The Mission Issuer MUST resolve the predecessor from the
assertion's mission_id, then verify the assertion per
Section 4.2.2, which checks the signature
against that same resolved Mission's own recorded cnf: naming one
Mission and signing with a different Mission's key MUST NOT
satisfy this step.¶
The Mission Issuer MUST verify that the resolved Mission is the
Mission named in predecessor.¶
PAR permits a public client to submit without client authentication ([RFC9126]), so a public client's expansion rests solely on the assertion of Section 4.2. Because that assertion's sender-constraint is required of every client, not only a public one, it is an eligibility precondition rather than a client-type-dependent rule: a predecessor with no sender-constrained credential has no key to verify an assertion against and cannot be expanded through this binding, whatever kind of client asks (below).¶
Establishing the binding at PAR, before the approval event, is
deliberate: the Mission Issuer resolves the predecessor from a real
grant and confirms it is active and owned by this client before
prompting the Approver. A client that merely names a mission_id it
does not hold a grant for cannot reach the consent step, so expansion
cannot be used to drive approval prompts against another party's
Mission.¶
The grant, not the identifier, determines the predecessor. The Mission
Issuer MUST refuse an expansion request whose predecessor
value does not match the Mission resolved from the assertion's
mission_id, with invalid_grant. A client that does not hold a
grant for the named predecessor cannot produce an assertion that
verifies against its cnf and so cannot expand it.¶
Stated as the eligibility rule rather than a consequence: this profile's expansion requires a refresh-token-bearing grant, because that is where the sender-constraint key the assertion verifies against is recorded, and a deployment that issues no refresh token for a Mission forgoes it. Nothing else is lost. Succession stays reachable through a fresh approval, a new Mission whose disclosure references the work it continues, since the successor's authority comes only from the fresh consent in any case; and the Subject or an administrator acts on the predecessor at the management plane regardless, whose standing is the authenticated principal, never a token's possession ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-status]). The grant proof gates the proposal channel (who may put an expansion wearing this predecessor's name in front of the Approver, and who may trigger the atomic supersession), never the authority: no proof failure can widen anything.¶
Presenting and verifying the relationship assertion in the PAR request observes:¶
The assertion's sender-constraint is satisfied per Section 4.2.1; no separate DPoP proof or mTLS step applies beyond what that section requires.¶
The predecessor's refresh token is never presented for this
binding, so verifying the assertion neither rotates it nor consumes
the deployment's refresh-token replay-detection budget: the
assertion has its own single-use jti check
(Section 4.2.2), entirely separate from
the predecessor's own refresh-token lifecycle.¶
Each expansion presentation MUST be recorded and counted toward the deployment's anomaly detection.¶
The per-predecessor rate limit (Section 13.5) applies unconditionally.¶
A stolen bearer predecessor refresh token, on its own, can no longer bind an expansion at all: with no refresh token in the request, only a party that also holds the predecessor's sender-constraint private key can produce a verifying assertion. The record-and-count rule remains useful against a different threat, a stolen sender-constraint key producing repeated assertions, or an authenticated client behaving anomalously. The successor's authority still comes only from the fresh consent at the approval event, never from authority the binding assertion could itself derive.¶
This binding requires the predecessor to have a refresh token whose
cnf key the assertion is verified against. A Mission issued without
one (for example an access-token-only grant) has no key to bind an
assertion to and so cannot be expanded through this binding; a
deployment that must expand such a Mission defines an alternative
grant proof by extension, or the task obtains its broadened authority
as an ordinary new Mission under the issuance profile, linked by the
successor's related_to member (Section 6) for lineage.¶
Because expansion reuses the issuance profile's grant binding, it needs no opaque expansion ticket or other new bearer: the predecessor is identified and authorized by the grant the client already holds for it, and a client cannot name an arbitrary predecessor.¶
The Mission Issuer MUST resolve the predecessor from the presented
grant and verify it is in the active state before adjudicating. An
expansion request against a predecessor that is not active MUST be
refused with invalid_grant and a reconciliation status
(Section 9):¶
if the predecessor made a terminal exit from active (it is
revoked, expired, or already superseded, Section 7),
the status is predecessor_state_changed;¶
if the predecessor is in a non-terminal non-active state, for example
suspended where the Mission Status profile
[I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-status] is deployed, the status
is predecessor_not_active.¶
Issuance gating in the issuance profile already refuses to derive from a non-active Mission; this rule extends the same gate to adjudicating an expansion of one.¶
Adjudication of an expansion is a fresh approval event under the issuance profile ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission]). The Mission Issuer runs the approval event as it does for any Mission, with the expansion-specific steps noted:¶
Resolve the predecessor from the presented grant and verify it is
the Mission named in predecessor and is active
(Section 4.3, Section 4.4).¶
Derive the successor's Authority Set from the submitted Mission Intent and bound it by policy, exactly as for any Mission. The successor's authority is whatever this derivation and the fresh consent yield; it is not the predecessor's authority plus a delta computed by this document. A deployment that wants the successor to retain the predecessor's authority expresses that authority in the expansion Mission Intent so the derivation reproduces it.¶
Authenticate the Approver and obtain fresh consent for the derived
Authority Set, satisfying any controls.acr, and render the Subject
when the Approver is not the Subject, per the issuance profile's
approval event. The consent disclosure MUST reflect the successor's
authority being adjudicated. (The experimental progressive
authorization companion defines a policy-adjudicated override of
this step for expansions within a pre-consented ceiling,
[I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-progressive].)¶
Compute the successor's integrity anchors (intent_hash,
authority_hash) and commit them in the authorization code the
approval event issues; defer materializing the successor. On the
first redemption of that authorization code (the successor's
grant), create the successor Mission record in the active state,
with its predecessor member set (Section 6),
atomically with the predecessor's transition to superseded
(Section 7). Until that redemption the predecessor
remains active; an authorization code that is never redeemed or
that expires creates no successor and leaves the predecessor
active.¶
The expansion is governed by the consent obtained at step 3. Expansion never widens authority without a new consent: if the Approver declines, no successor is created and the predecessor is untouched (Section 10).¶
Supersession is a terminal exit from active, so it is a terminal
cascade trigger for the predecessor's entire delegation tree under the
child-delegation profile
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-child-delegation]). When the
predecessor has non-terminal Child Missions, the expansion consent
disclosure SHOULD surface that fact as a material notice: at minimum
the count of live Child Missions and that supersession terminates
them. A child still needed after the expansion is re-created under the
successor through ordinary child creation, in generation order. A
deployment MAY additionally support an expansion-request parameter by
which the client asks the Mission Issuer to refuse the expansion while
live Child Missions exist.¶
The successor's expires_at MUST NOT exceed the predecessor's
expires_at unless the Mission Issuer's policy explicitly permits
extension and the extension is disclosed to the Approver at the
expansion consent event. Expansion is an authority-addition mechanism,
not a lifetime-extension mechanism. The issuance profile caps every
derived credential's exp at the Mission's expires_at; a successor that
silently outlived its predecessor would let expansion launder a
longer-lived Mission past the originally approved horizon.¶
The successor records a lineage link to the predecessor as a
predecessor member, both on the successor's mission claim and on
the successor's Mission record.¶
The issuance profile's mission claim is an open object: additional
members MAY appear alongside id, issuer, and authority_hash, each
defined by the profile that introduces it, and a consumer MUST ignore
members it does not understand and MUST NOT use any additional member
to grant or widen authority ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission]).
This document introduces one such member:¶
predecessor:REQUIRED on a successor Mission; absent otherwise. A string. The
mission_id of the Mission this Mission succeeded by expansion.
Present on every Mission created by expansion and absent on a Mission
that was not created by expansion. It links the successor to the
Mission it replaced so that the expansion chain is observable in
audit.¶
The same predecessor value is recorded on the successor's immutable
Mission record so that the lineage is durable independently of any
derived token.¶
This document defines two further lineage members:¶
related_to:OPTIONAL. A string. The mission_id of a Mission this Mission is
related to by lineage without superseding it, used for a non-superseding
link such as a branch (Section 8). Unlike predecessor, its
presence does not imply that the referenced Mission was superseded and
it carries no lifecycle consequence.¶
successor:OPTIONAL. A string. The mission_id of the successor that superseded
this Mission by expansion, recorded on the superseded predecessor's
Mission record at supersession (Section 7). It is the
reverse of the successor's predecessor link, letting a consumer that
holds a superseded predecessor discover its successor directly.
The Status profile surfaces it in the status response
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-status]) and the Signals profile
in the superseded lifecycle event
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-signals]).¶
predecessor, related_to, and successor are lineage and audit
context only. Consistent with the issuance profile's
open-mission-claim rule, each of them MUST NOT grant or widen
authority, and a consumer that does not understand one MUST ignore it.
The successor's authority comes only from its own authority_hash,
never from its predecessor.¶
predecessor, related_to, and successor are each a bare Mission
Identifier string, not an object like the parent member of a Child
Mission
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-child-delegation]): same-issuer
succession needs only the identifier to resolve the linked Mission at the
shared issuer, whereas parentage carries cascade semantics and
cross-object integrity that require a structured member.¶
Properties:¶
Cardinality. A successor has at most one predecessor. An
expansion chain is expressed by walking predecessor links from a
successor back toward the original Mission.¶
Immutability. predecessor is set at the successor's approval
event and MUST NOT change thereafter. The Mission record is immutable
except for its state and the one-time successor link a supersession
sets on the predecessor (Section 7).¶
Origin. The predecessor and successor share an issuer: an
expansion is adjudicated by the predecessor's Mission Issuer. A
consumer correlating a chain resolves each link at that issuer.¶
Example successor mission claim on a derived token (non-normative;
other token claims omitted):¶
{
"mission": {
"id": "msn_2Yt7Qv9LqMv4z7sA2bN1k0YpEdHc9RfX",
"issuer": "https://as.example.com",
"authority_hash":
"sha-256:Td9bM7sX1cF8gH2vJ4kE5pNQl3KvZ4mP5x0wQrR6tY2",
"predecessor": "msn_8RfX2Lqv9TqMv4z7sA2bN1k0YpEdHc9-"
}
}
¶
This document adds one terminal state to the issuance profile's lifecycle, used only by expansion:¶
superseded:A predecessor Mission that a successor has replaced through a replacement expansion. Terminal and non-active.¶
A deployment that never expands a Mission never produces this state;
the issuance profile's active/revoked/expired lifecycle is
unchanged for it. The transition is:¶
| From | Event | To |
|---|---|---|
active
|
successor activates on first redemption of its grant |
superseded
|
The transition has these requirements:¶
Atomic with successor activation at first redemption. The
successor activates, and the predecessor enters superseded, in one
atomic operation at the first redemption of the successor's
authorization code (its grant), not at the approval event
(Section 5). In that same operation the Mission Issuer sets
the predecessor's successor member to the successor's mission_id
(Section 6). Until that redemption the predecessor
remains active.¶
An authorization code that is never redeemed or that expires
activates no successor and leaves the predecessor active, so an
unredeemed or expired code never strands the task's authority nor
cascade-terminates the predecessor's Child Missions.¶
If the atomic operation fails, the predecessor remains active
and no successor record exists. The Mission Issuer MUST NOT
produce a partial successor or a predecessor left in an
indeterminate state.¶
Non-active: no further derivation. A superseded Mission is not
active, so the issuance profile's issuance gating refuses to derive
any new token, refresh, token exchange, or cross-domain grant under
it: derivation proceeds only from an active Mission
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission]). New authority for the task
flows through the successor.¶
Already-issued predecessor tokens. Tokens already derived under
the predecessor before it was superseded remain valid until their own
exp, exactly as in the issuance profile's revocation model:
superseding a Mission stops new derivation; it does not retroactively
invalidate access tokens already issued.¶
These tokens MUST NOT be silently rebound to the successor. Authority under the successor is obtained only by deriving from the successor's grant, which is a new derivation governed by the successor's Authority Set.¶
A deployment that needs a lower cutoff latency on the predecessor's outstanding tokens SHOULD use short token lifetimes. It MAY additionally revoke the predecessor's refresh token where the issuance profile's optional revocation composition is in use.¶
Reported as non-active. A superseded predecessor is reported
through the same mechanisms that report a revoked or expired
Mission. Where the issuance profile's optional token introspection is
offered, the composite active is false and, from the issuer, the
mission.state member gives superseded. Where the Mission Status
profile [I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-status] is deployed, the
dedicated Status operation reports superseded among the terminal
states and the Status Response mission.state gives superseded. A
deployment that offers either surface and this document MUST include
superseded among the lifecycle states its issuer may report.
Consumers rely on the issuance profile's forward-compatibility rule:
superseded, like any non-active state, is non-deriving.¶
The Mission Issuer MUST NOT implicitly resurrect a superseded
predecessor when its successor is later revoked, expired, or itself
superseded; superseded is terminal. A deployment that needs
"revert to the predecessor's authority" semantics expresses that as a
new approval event creating a new Mission that carries the relevant
authority, with its own predecessor link preserving the lineage. A
rollback is therefore a new governed Mission, not a state reversal.¶
A successful expansion is a replacement: the successor replaces the
predecessor, and the predecessor becomes superseded
(Section 7). Replacement is the only mode this document
defines.¶
Under replacement, exactly one successor is created per predecessor,
and the predecessor is no longer active once the successor activates.
The successor carries its own complete Authority Set as derived and
consented at the expansion approval event; it does not inherit the
predecessor's authority by reference. A deployment that wants the
successor to retain the predecessor's authority alongside the new
authority expresses the combined authority in the expansion Mission
Intent, so the successor's authority_hash commits exactly the
authority the Approver saw and approved (Section 5).¶
A branch mode, in which the predecessor and the successor both
remain active after expansion (for example, a separately scoped child
task running alongside the original), is OPTIONAL and is not defined
here. A deployment that needs a separately scoped task alongside a
still-active Mission creates an ordinary new Mission under the issuance
profile and MAY set that Mission's related_to member
(Section 6) to the original Mission's mission_id to
preserve lineage; it does not set predecessor, which would imply a
supersession, so the original remains active. An atomic, grant-bound
branch
expansion that creates such a child within a single expansion approval
event is deferred to a future revision of this document.¶
More than one expansion request MAY be in flight against the same predecessor at once, and more than one MAY be adjudicated and hold an unredeemed authorization code. Because replacement produces exactly one successor per predecessor (Section 8) and supersession is deferred to first redemption (Section 7), the Mission Issuer MUST serialize the redemptions that would activate a successor of the same predecessor, so that concurrent expansions cannot each activate one.¶
The Mission Issuer MUST apply compare-and-set semantics at the first redemption of a successor's authorization code. In the same atomic step that would activate the successor and supersede the predecessor, the Mission Issuer MUST verify:¶
the predecessor is still in the active state; and¶
no other replacement expansion has already activated a successor for
this predecessor (equivalently, the predecessor has not already
transitioned to superseded).¶
If either check fails, the Mission Issuer MUST refuse the redemption
with invalid_grant and the applicable reconciliation status from the
closed set below. The losing or otherwise stale expansion is rejected
at redemption; it activates no successor.¶
The reconciliation status codes are:¶
superseded_by_concurrent_expansion:A concurrent replacement expansion has already produced a successor;
the predecessor is now superseded rather than active. The client
SHOULD discover the existing successor and re-evaluate whether a
further expansion is still required (an expansion of the successor is
a new expansion against the successor as predecessor).¶
predecessor_state_changed:The predecessor made a terminal exit from active (to revoked,
expired, or superseded) before this expansion could complete,
whether caught at request binding (Section 4.4) or at the
compare-and-set on first redemption (Section 9). The client
MUST NOT retry the same expansion against this predecessor.¶
predecessor_not_active:The predecessor is in a non-terminal non-active state (for example
suspended under the Mission Status profile
[I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-status]) and cannot be expanded
until it returns to active. The client MAY retry the expansion after
the predecessor is active again.¶
The two terminal-exit codes overlap in the superseded case by design:
superseded_by_concurrent_expansion is the specific reconciliation
outcome when the cause is a concurrent expansion that has already won,
and predecessor_state_changed is the general outcome for any other
terminal exit from active. A Mission Issuer SHOULD return the specific
code when it can attribute the change to a concurrent expansion.
predecessor_not_active is distinct from both: it reports a reversible,
non-terminal state, so it invites the retry the terminal codes forbid.¶
The Mission Issuer conveys the reconciliation status in a
mission_expansion_status member of the OAuth error response body,
alongside the invalid_grant error:¶
mission_expansion_status:A string carrying one reconciliation status from this document's
closed set (Section 9). It is returned by the step that
failed. At the PAR and token endpoints it is a member of the JSON
error response body, alongside the OAuth error member. On the
front-channel authorization error response, which carries error
parameters rather than a JSON body, it is carried as an error
response parameter of the same name. Adjudication denial reasons
ride the separate mission_denial_reason member
(Section 10).¶
An adjudication that completes with the Approver declining, or with the
Mission Issuer refusing on policy grounds, denies the expansion: no
successor is created and the predecessor remains active and
untouched. Such a denial is an OAuth error at the approval or token
step per the issuance profile (typically invalid_request for a
request the Mission Issuer will not derive a valid Authority Set from,
or the approval flow's own decline path). It MAY additionally carry one
machine-readable reason code from the closed set below:¶
out_of_policy:The Mission Issuer's governance policy refuses the requested authority class for this Mission, independent of who approves.¶
approver_rejected:The Approver declined the expansion at the consent step.¶
out_of_scope_for_purpose:The requested authority is incompatible with the Mission's recorded
purpose; a different Mission, not an expansion of this one, is the
appropriate vehicle.¶
A companion profile MAY extend this set by specification (the
experimental progressive authorization companion defines
out_of_ceiling, [I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-progressive]);
a consumer MUST treat an unrecognized reason code as a denial with no
further semantics.¶
A Mission Issuer MUST NOT use a reason code to disclose policy
boundaries beyond the adjudicated request (Section 13.5); omitting
the reason code is always permitted. When present, a reason code is
carried in a mission_denial_reason member: at the PAR and token
endpoints a member of the JSON error response body alongside the OAuth
error member, on the front-channel authorization error response an
error response parameter of the same name.¶
mission_denial_reason is the shared carrier for adjudication denial
reasons across the profiles that mint a Mission related to an existing
one: the child delegation profile
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-child-delegation]) carries its
own closed denial-reason set in the same member, and further such
profiles do likewise. Each profile defines its values by
specification; the unrecognized-code rule above applies to the member
wherever it appears.¶
Two failure classes are not denial reasons and use the issuance
profile's error vocabulary directly: an expansion request whose
predecessor does not match the grant-resolved Mission, or
whose predecessor is not active, fails with invalid_grant
(Section 4.3, Section 4.4); an expansion Mission
Intent the Mission Issuer cannot parse or cannot derive a valid
Authority Set from fails with invalid_request or, where the issuance
profile uses it, invalid_authorization_details ([RFC9396]), exactly
as for any Mission creation.¶
The Q3 reconciliation Mission
msn_8RfX2Lqv9TqMv4z7sA2bN1k0YpEdHc9- authorizes reading invoices and
posting journal entries under $500. Mid-task the agent finds an
adjustment of $1,200, outside the active Mission's authority. It cannot
widen in place; it requests an expansion, submitting a new Mission
Intent through PAR bound to the predecessor's grant:¶
POST /par HTTP/1.1 Host: as.example.com Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded mission_intent=%7B...journal-entries%20cap%20%242000...%7D& predecessor=msn_8RfX2Lqv9TqMv4z7sA2bN1k0YpEdHc9-& predecessor_assertion=<Mission%20relationship%20assertion%20signed%20 against%20the%20predecessor%27s%20cnf%20key>& client_id=s6BhdRkqt3¶
The decoded predecessor_assertion (its signature omitted here):¶
{
"iss": "s6BhdRkqt3",
"sub": "s6BhdRkqt3",
"aud": "https://as.example.com",
"iat": 1793607000,
"exp": 1793607180,
"jti": "rla_4mK7pQ2xV9rT6nL1sB",
"mission_id": "msn_8RfX2Lqv9TqMv4z7sA2bN1k0YpEdHc9-",
"mission_operation": "mission-expansion"
}
¶
The Mission Issuer resolves the predecessor from mission_id,
verifies the assertion per Section 4.2.2
(its signature against that Mission's own recorded cnf, aud,
lifetime, and unseen jti), confirms it
matches predecessor and is active, derives the successor's Authority
Set, and obtains fresh consent from alice for the widened cap,
issuing an authorization code. When the client redeems that code, the
Mission Issuer activates the successor and supersedes the predecessor
atomically; until then the predecessor stays active. The successor's
token carries a predecessor member:¶
{
"mission": {
"id": "msn_2Yt7Qv9LqMv4z7sA2bN1k0YpEdHc9RfX",
"issuer": "https://as.example.com",
"authority_hash":
"sha-256:Td9bM7sX1cF8gH2vJ4kE5pNQl3KvZ4mP5x0wQrR6tY2",
"predecessor": "msn_8RfX2Lqv9TqMv4z7sA2bN1k0YpEdHc9-"
}
}
¶
The predecessor is now superseded: it derives no new tokens, its
already-issued tokens run out their short lifetimes, and the task
continues under the successor. The widening came only from alice's
fresh consent; the successor's authority_hash commits the widened
Authority Set it was actually approved for, not the predecessor's plus a
delta.¶
An implementation claims conformance to this document only in the Mission Issuer role and only when it adjudicates expansion. A conforming expansion-capable Mission Issuer MUST:¶
accept the predecessor and predecessor_assertion
request parameters on a Mission creation via PAR, verify the
assertion per Section 4.2.2, and treat the
request as an expansion (Section 4.1);¶
refuse a refresh token presented in predecessor_assertion with
invalid_request (Section 4.1);¶
bind the expansion request to the predecessor's grant and refuse a
request whose predecessor does not match the Mission resolved from
the assertion, or whose predecessor is not active, with
invalid_grant (Section 4.3, Section 4.4);¶
adjudicate the expansion as a fresh approval event that obtains new consent for the successor's authority (Section 5), enforcing the successor-expiry rule (Section 5.1);¶
record the predecessor member on the successor's mission claim
and Mission record (Section 6);¶
activate the successor and transition the predecessor to superseded
atomically at the first redemption of the successor's grant, leaving
the predecessor active until then, and refuse further derivation
under a superseded Mission (Section 7); and¶
serialize concurrent expansions against the same predecessor with the reconciliation semantics of Section 9.¶
An expansion-capable Mission Issuer is also a conforming issuance-profile
Mission Issuer ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission]); this document
adds the expansion surface to that role. A Resource Server requires no
new behavior: it enforces a successor's tokens exactly as it enforces
any Mission-bound token, and treats the predecessor member, if it
reads it at all, as audit context it MUST NOT use to grant authority
(Section 6).¶
Every expansion this document defines is adjudicated as a fresh approval event (Section 5). The experimental progressive authorization companion defines a further OPTIONAL capability, Expansion with Progressive Authorization, with its own conformance requirements ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-progressive]).¶
Expansion's central guarantee is the issuance profile's, applied to the successor: a user's fresh approval bounds every token derived for the broadened task. The risks specific to expansion are in the predecessor binding, the predecessor-to-successor handoff, and the lineage link.¶
A client could attempt to expand a Mission it does not control, for
example by naming another tenant's or subject's mission_id in the
predecessor parameter.¶
Mitigations:¶
The predecessor is resolved from the assertion's mission_id, then
the assertion's signature MUST verify against that same resolved
Mission's own recorded cnf, never a different Mission's key
(Section 4.2.2); the Mission Issuer also
verifies that the resolved Mission matches the predecessor request
value and refuses a mismatch with invalid_grant
(Section 4.3). A client that holds no grant for the named
predecessor cannot produce an assertion that verifies against its
key and so cannot expand it.¶
The issuance profile's integrity anchors are issuer-bound, so a
Mission's governance state cannot be transplanted across Mission
Issuers; an expansion is adjudicated only at the predecessor's own
issuer, which the assertion's aud also binds it to
(Section 4.2).¶
An expansion could be misused to widen authority without the Approver re-consenting, if a successor were allowed to inherit or extend authority without a fresh approval.¶
Mitigations:¶
The successor's authority comes only from the Authority Set derived
and consented at the expansion approval event; the authority_hash
commits exactly that set (Section 5). The predecessor member
carries no authority and cannot widen the successor
(Section 6).¶
The successor-expiry rule (Section 5.1) keeps the
successor's expires_at from silently exceeding the predecessor's,
so expansion cannot launder a longer lifetime past the originally
approved horizon.¶
Between the moment a client decides to expand and the moment the successor activates at first redemption, the predecessor may be revoked, expire, or be superseded by a concurrent expansion. Without serialization an expansion could appear to succeed against a predecessor that is no longer authoritative, or two successors could be created.¶
Mitigations:¶
The Mission Issuer verifies predecessor state and the no-existing-successor condition in the same atomic step that would activate the successor at first redemption, and serializes the redemptions that activate a successor of the same predecessor (Section 9).¶
A failed check refuses with invalid_grant and a reconciliation
status that tells the client whether to discover an existing
successor or stop, without leaking the predecessor's new internal
state beyond that (Section 9).¶
Conflating expansion with authentication step-up [RFC9470] would route an authentication shortfall through an approval event the Approver did not need to perform, surfacing irrelevant consent and risking approval fatigue, or conversely would treat a genuine authority shortfall as a mere re-authentication and silently widen nothing.¶
Mitigation: a denial that is an authentication shortfall (acr,
amr) is satisfied by step-up and MUST NOT be routed to expansion; a
denial that is an authority shortfall is the one expansion addresses
(Section 3.3). The component that classifies the denial
(Section 3.2) makes this distinction.¶
A client could submit many expansion requests for the same predecessor to map the Mission Issuer's policy boundary from the denial reasons.¶
Mitigations:¶
The Mission Issuer MUST rate-limit expansion requests per predecessor per client. The bound is unconditional: it caps both policy probing and the approval prompts a client can drive against an Approver (prompt fatigue), and applies regardless of client type because the assertion's sender-constraint is itself required unconditionally (Section 4.3).¶
A denial reason MUST NOT disclose policy boundaries beyond the adjudicated request (Section 10); a denial reports whether the requested authority was approved, not the full surface of what would have been.¶
The predecessor member makes the expansion chain observable: an
authorized auditor can trace a successor back through its predecessors
to the original Mission. This is a core governance property of
expansion. An implementation that omits the member breaks the chain
and defeats it; the member is therefore mandatory on a successor
(Section 6).¶
General OAuth security guidance applies to the underlying credentials through the issuance profile.¶
An intercepted predecessor_assertion is a narrower prize than an
intercepted refresh token was: it is unexpired for at most 300 seconds,
redeemable exactly once, and useless without the predecessor's own
sender-constraint private key, since the theft of the assertion alone
does not convey that key (Section 4.2.1). A thief who
also holds the key could already act as the predecessor directly and
gains nothing from the assertion that key does not already give them.¶
The privacy surface expansion adds over the issuance profile is the lineage link and the authority detail disclosed when a task is broadened.¶
The predecessor member that gives audit linkage (Section 13.6)
is also a correlation surface: it links a successor to its predecessor
across distinct approval events, so a party that can read the chain can
correlate the evolving task over time, which is more than any single
Mission discloses. This is intrinsic to the governance value of
expansion. Deployments SHOULD scope read access to the predecessor
member, and to any Mission-state surface that exposes it, to parties
with a governance need, rather than exposing the chain to every
credential audience. The issuance profile's Mission Identifier
correlation considerations apply to each Mission in the chain.¶
The expansion Mission Intent and the consent disclosure rendered at the expansion approval event reveal how the approved task is evolving. The Mission Issuer SHOULD render that disclosure only to the Approver and authorized governance consumers, consistent with the issuance profile's treatment of consent disclosure.¶
The predecessor member of the mission claim
(Section 6) is not registered in a dedicated registry: it
is carried inside the already-registered mission claim, an open
object for which the issuance profile establishes no member registry.
No new claim, parameter, or token-introspection registration is
required for the lineage link.¶
This document defines two closed sets of symbolic codes, the expansion
reconciliation status codes (Section 9), conveyed in
mission_expansion_status, and the expansion denial reasons
(Section 10), conveyed in the shared mission_denial_reason
member. As members of the OAuth error response JSON body at the PAR
and token endpoints, both are namespaced to their error responses and
require no registration; their authorization error response parameter
forms are registered below. This document creates no registry for the
codes: the closed sets are small and fully specified in their defining
specifications. Should interoperable extension prove necessary, a
future revision can create a "Mission Expansion Reconciliation Status"
registry and a shared "Mission Denial Reason" registry with a
Specification Required [RFC8126] policy.¶
This document registers the following parameters in the "OAuth Parameters" registry:¶
Name: predecessor¶
Parameter Usage Location: authorization request¶
Change Controller: IETF¶
Reference: this document, Section 4.1¶
Name: predecessor_assertion¶
Parameter Usage Location: authorization request¶
Change Controller: IETF¶
Reference: this document, Section 4.1, Section 4.2¶
Name: mission_expansion_status¶
Parameter Usage Location: authorization response¶
Change Controller: IETF¶
Name: mission_denial_reason¶
Parameter Usage Location: authorization response¶
Change Controller: IETF¶
Reference: this document, Section 10; also carried by the child delegation profile ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-child-delegation])¶
As with mission_intent in the issuance profile, PAR [RFC9126]
carries authorization-request parameters without a distinct usage
location, so the pushed submission of these parameters needs no
separate registration. predecessor_assertion carries a Mission
relationship assertion (Section 4.2), never a refresh
token, and is submitted only through PAR, never on a front-channel
authorization request (Section 4.1).¶
The author thanks the reviewers of the Mission-Bound Authorization for OAuth 2.0 profile for feedback on the expansion model and its composition with the issuance flow.¶