| Internet-Draft | OAuth Mission Status | October 2026 |
| McGuinness | Expires 6 April 2027 | [Page] |
The Mission-Bound Authorization for OAuth 2.0 profile binds issued
authority to a durable, human-approved Mission and gates issuance on
Mission state, but it observes Mission state only through token lifetime
and optional token introspection. This document
defines the Mission state-management surfaces it defers: the Mission
Status operation (keyed by mission_id) with signed responses, the
Mission projection for token introspection, the Mission Lifecycle
endpoint with revoke, suspend, resume, and complete
operations, the suspended and completed states with the consolidated
lifecycle state machine this profile owns, and revocation-propagation
guidance. It defines an extension point through which a companion
profile MAY add a fleet-scale Mission Status List or an entry-grain
discharge operation without altering this profile's own surfaces.
Each capability is independently optional; an implementation can adopt
any subset, and one that adopts none remains a conforming issuance
profile.¶
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-status.html. Status information for this document may be found at https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-status/.¶
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 6 April 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.¶
The issuance profile [I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission] 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 is, by design, a minimum-viable issuance layer.
It gates derivation on Mission state, carries the mission claim on
every derived token, and offers only OPTIONAL token introspection
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission], Section "Mission State via
Token Introspection") as a way for a Resource Server to observe
Mission state. It names this profile for the canonical Mission Status
surface (keyed by mission_id) and its signed status evidence, and
defers a standardized management endpoint for lifecycle transitions to
this document.¶
This document specifies those surfaces as optional extensions that build on the issuance profile. The capabilities are:¶
A dedicated Mission Status operation
(Section 3), which any consumer holding a mission_id
resolves, with responses signed as a JWS [RFC7515].¶
An extension to OAuth token introspection that carries a Mission projection, which a deployment MAY return as a [RFC9701]-signed response (Section 4).¶
A Mission Lifecycle endpoint (Section 5)
for explicit revoke, suspend, resume, and complete
operations, distinct from [RFC7009] token revocation, with an
extension point through which a companion profile MAY register a
further operation value, such as the Entry Discharge companion's
discharge ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-discharge]).¶
A fleet-scale Mission Status List extension point, profiled by the Status List companion ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-status-list]).¶
Revocation propagation guidance
(Section 6): a mission_max_stale_seconds
bound and how to size token lifetimes to the propagation mechanisms
in use.¶
Authorization Server metadata members (Section 8) advertising the endpoints above.¶
Each capability is independently optional. An implementation states which it supports through the metadata of Section 8 and the conformance language of Section 9. An implementation that supports none of them is unaffected and remains a conforming issuance profile.¶
This document does not restate the issuance profile. The Mission Intent,
authority derivation, the mission claim, the integrity anchors,
Mission-bound token issuance, the subset rule, and lifecycle gating are
all defined in [I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission]; the
mission_resource_access authorization details type is defined in its
Mission Resource Access Profile
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-resource-access]); both are
referenced, not re-specified, here.¶
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.¶
This document uses the terms defined in the issuance profile
[I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission], in particular Mission,
Mission Issuer (the Mission issuer: in this document's OAuth binding
the Authorization Server; a standalone Mission Issuer, the Mission
Authority Server [I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-authority-server],
serves these surfaces with the same semantics; the AAuth Person
Server plays the same role for its native missions through its own
AAuth-native management surface
[I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-aauth]), Authority Set, the
mission claim, and mission_id; and the mission_resource_access
authorization details type defined in its Mission Resource Access
Profile ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-resource-access]).
Resource AS is used as defined in the
cross-domain companion
[I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-cross-domain]. It additionally
uses:¶
A signed payload returned by the dedicated Mission Status operation (Section 3), reporting a Mission's current state and the audience-scoped evidence a consumer needs.¶
The state of a mission_resource_access entry whose terminal_when
completion condition has been met, as defined by the Entry
Discharge companion
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-discharge]). A discharged
entry's authority is spent: it is no longer derivable.¶
The approved Authority Set after applying every issuer-held, monotonic narrowing mechanism the deployment runs. Where the Entry Discharge companion is adopted, it contributes discharged entries ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-discharge]). Each other narrowing profile defines its own subtraction. No narrowing mechanism adds or restores authority. Membership in this set is necessary, never sufficient, for an action to proceed: the runtime decision evaluates it alongside every other required decision input ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-runtime]).¶
All JSON shown in this document is non-normative and illustrative; the member definitions in the surrounding text are authoritative. HTTP message examples follow the conventions of [RFC9110]; long URLs and form parameters are wrapped for display. JWT and JWS examples are shown as decoded JSON with separate header objects; on the wire the JWS Compact Serialization [RFC7515] applies.¶
This section is OPTIONAL. The issuance profile's stateless baseline needs no dedicated status surface ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission], Section "Mission Lifecycle and Gating"); a deployment that does not stand up this operation, and a consumer that does not use it, are unaffected.¶
The dedicated Mission Status operation is the canonical status surface
the issuance profile defers. Unlike token introspection
(Section 4), which answers "is this
token's authorization still good," the Mission Status operation answers
"what is the state of this Mission" keyed by the mission_id alone. Any
consumer holding a mission_id (including an auditor or a
cross-domain Resource AS) resolves it without holding a token the AS
issued.¶
The Mission Issuer publishes its Mission Status endpoint URL in
Authorization Server metadata (Section 8) as
mission_status_endpoint, which a consumer resolves from a
credential's mission.issuer. The endpoint MUST be served over TLS
1.2 or later (TLS 1.3 RECOMMENDED), following the recommendations of
[RFC9325].¶
The request is an HTTPS POST with an
application/x-www-form-urlencoded body containing:¶
mission_id:REQUIRED. A string. The canonical Mission Identifier, named per the issuance profile's external-surface convention ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission]).¶
audience:CONDITIONAL. A string. The audience identifier of the
requesting consumer, or of another audience the Mission Issuer
authorizes that consumer to request (below). An authorized non-RS
consumer (for example an auditor or a cross-domain Resource AS) that
needs only Mission state,
not audience-scoped authority, MAY omit audience; the response is
then state-only and carries no authorization_details
(Section 3.4). A Resource Server resolving authority
for a specific audience MUST send it.¶
nonce:REQUIRED. A string. A client-generated nonce binding the
response to this request. It MUST be unique per request within the
response lifetime. A consumer MUST reject a response whose nonce
does not equal the one it sent. This is a standard client challenge:
echoing it in the signed response anti-replay-binds that response to
this specific request.¶
A request's audience names the caller's own audience unless the
Mission Issuer's configuration authorizes the caller for another. A
consuming Authorization Server under the Mission Issuance Grant
profile ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-issuance-grant]), for
example, requests the projection for each resource it issues tokens
for. The Mission Issuer MUST honor a request naming an audience other
than the caller's own only where its configuration authorizes the
authenticated caller for that audience, and MUST otherwise refuse it
with the not-found response of Section 3.7. The
response's aud is the requested audience
(Section 3.4).¶
The request MUST be authenticated. The AS MUST support at least one of the following mechanisms. The client MUST use exactly one of them per request:¶
mTLS client authentication [RFC8705]. The AS validates the
client's X.509 certificate against its configured trust anchors and
the client's registered tls_client_auth metadata.¶
Sender-constrained access token. The client presents a
mission_status-scoped access token (see the authorization
requirement below) in the Authorization header, sender-constrained
either by DPoP [RFC9449] (the DPoP scheme with a DPoP proof
header, the token's cnf.jkt matching the proof key thumbprint) or
by mTLS [RFC8705] (a certificate-bound token, the Bearer scheme,
whose cnf.x5t#S256 matches the presented client certificate). The
token MUST be audience-restricted to this endpoint's
protected-resource identifier (below).¶
Private-key-JWT client authentication [RFC7523]. The client
presents client_assertion_type with the exact value
urn:ietf:params:oauth:client-assertion-type:jwt-bearer and a signed
JWT as client_assertion. The assertion's aud MUST name the URL of
the endpoint being invoked (the mission_status_endpoint for a
Status request, the mission_lifecycle_endpoint for a Lifecycle
request), not the token endpoint; the AS MUST reject an assertion
whose aud names no such endpoint. The AS accepts only the JWS
[RFC7515] algorithms it advertises for that endpoint
(Section 8); none MUST NOT be used.¶
Plain Basic or POST client authentication MUST NOT be used for this
endpoint. The AS MUST refuse a request not authenticated by one of the
three mechanisms with unauthorized (HTTP 401). The mechanism is
determined by wire evidence in order: a request presenting an access
token in Authorization is mechanism 2, and any client certificate is
then evaluated only as that token's mTLS sender constraint; otherwise a
request presenting client_assertion is mechanism 3, and any client
certificate is not treated as client authentication; otherwise a request
presenting only a client certificate is mechanism 1. This order keeps
"exactly one mechanism" satisfiable when mTLS terminates at the edge.¶
An authenticated caller MUST additionally carry an explicit read
authorization: a mission_status scope on the presented access token,
or a deployment-defined equivalent grant bound to the authenticated
client. The mission_status scope authorizes the Mission Status read
operation and mirrors the mission_lifecycle scope of the Mission
Lifecycle endpoint (Section 5). The token-less
path is preserved: a consumer that holds only a mission_id and
authenticates directly as a client (mechanism 1 or 3) carries the
deployment-defined equivalent grant, not a scope, and so resolves
Mission state without holding an access token the AS issued. A caller
carrying no such authorization is refused with the not-found response
of Section 3.7 (Section 3.6).¶
A presented access token (mechanism 2) MUST be audience-restricted to
this endpoint's protected-resource identifier: the resource value the
AS publishes for this endpoint in its Protected Resource Metadata
[RFC9728]. For these surfaces that identifier is the endpoint's own URL
(the mission_status_endpoint or mission_lifecycle_endpoint), so the
mechanism-2 access-token audience and the mechanism-3 private-key-JWT
aud name the same value. The AS MUST reject a token whose audience does
not name that identifier. This token audience is distinct from the request body's
audience parameter (Section 3.1): the token audience
authorizes the call at this endpoint, whereas the request audience
carries no authentication weight and only selects the
Resource-Server-specific authority projection the response returns
(Section 3.4).¶
Which mechanisms and authorization this endpoint accepts are
discoverable per endpoint, not inferred from the token endpoint's
metadata. The AS advertises the methods this endpoint accepts in
mission_status_endpoint_auth_methods_supported (Section 8).¶
For
the sender-constrained access-token path, this endpoint is an OAuth
protected resource: the AS publishes, in its Protected Resource Metadata
for this resource [RFC9728], the resource identifier the token's
audience MUST name, the mission_status scope it requires
(scopes_supported), and the presentation and sender constraints it
accepts (bearer_methods_supported, dpop_bound_access_tokens_required,
tls_client_certificate_bound_access_tokens). For the retained
direct-client-authentication path (mTLS [RFC8705] or private-key JWT
[RFC7523]), the accepted methods and, for private_key_jwt, the
accepted client-assertion signing algorithms are advertised for this
endpoint (Section 8), not read from the token endpoint's
token_endpoint_auth_methods_supported [RFC8414]. Both paths are
therefore discoverable.¶
On success the AS returns a JWS Compact Serialization [RFC7515]
signed with a key published in the AS's jwks_uri. The JWS header
carries typ of mission-status-response+jwt and a kid identifying
the signing key. Per [RFC7515] Section 4.1.9 the typ header omits
the application/ prefix; the full media type
application/mission-status-response+jwt (registered in Section 12) is
used as the HTTP Content-Type. Exact validation of the protected
typ value, together with mutually exclusive validation rules for
the artifact profiles, implements the substitution defense of
[RFC8725], Sections 3.11 and 3.12.¶
[RFC9701] signed introspection responses are scoped to token
introspection and do not apply to a lookup keyed by mission_id; the
dedicated Mission Status operation therefore uses a new media type and a
JWS, not [RFC9701] (see Section 10.4). Implementations
MUST NOT use [RFC9701] for the dedicated Mission Status operation.¶
The signed payload reports the Mission's current state and the audience-scoped evidence the consumer needs.¶
Decoded JWS header:¶
{
"alg": "ES256",
"kid": "sa-key-2026-q3",
"typ": "mission-status-response+jwt"
}
¶
Decoded JWS payload:¶
{
"iss": "https://as.example.com",
"aud": "https://erp.example.com",
"sub": "client_erp-recon-agent",
"nonce": "nonce_K9pV4nT2sR7mB1xQ",
"iat": 1793606400,
"exp": 1793606460,
"mission": {
"id": "msn_8RfX2Lqv9TqMv4z7sA2bN1k0YpEdHc9-",
"issuer": "https://as.example.com",
"authority_hash":
"sha-256:l3KvZ4mP5x0wQrR6tY2nD9bM7sX1cF8gH2vJ4kE5pNQ",
"state": "active",
"version": 4,
"expires_at": "2026-12-31T23:59:59Z",
"fresh_until": "2026-11-02T08:00:45Z"
},
"authorization_details": [
{ "type": "mission_resource_access",
"resource": "https://erp.example.com",
"actions": ["invoices.read", "journal-entries.write"] }
]
}
¶
The members are:¶
The signed JWT envelope iss, aud, sub, nonce, iat, exp.
The aud is the response's audience binding and the nonce its
request binding. When the request omitted audience
(Section 3.1), the response is state-only and the AS
MUST set aud to the authenticated requester's identifier, as the
Lifecycle endpoint does (Section 5); the
consumer's aud verification below then checks that identifier. exp bounds the validity of the signed response
itself; how long the consumer MAY rely on the reported state is
given separately by mission.fresh_until below.¶
mission: the mission object, the same shape as the mission
claim of [I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission] (Section "The
Mission Claim") with status members added. It carries:¶
id, issuer: the subject Mission's identifier and issuer.¶
authority_hash: OPTIONAL. The issuance profile's consent
commitment over the Authority Set ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission],
Section "Integrity Anchors"), disclosed at the AS's discretion to
a caller it authorizes for audit or correlation use, on the same
minimization footing as the issuance profile's introspection
disclosure privilege ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission],
Section "Caller Authorization and Minimization"). Not carried on
the issuance profile's baseline mission claim.¶
state: the current Mission lifecycle state. The authoritative
state space is the issuance profile's
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission], Section "Mission Lifecycle
and Gating"): the issuance profile states active, revoked, expired, this
profile's suspended and completed when the Mission Lifecycle
endpoint (Section 5) is deployed, and any
further state a companion profile defines and the deployment runs
(for example superseded, defined by the Mission Expansion profile
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-expansion]) for an expanded
predecessor, or cascaded, defined by the Mission Child Delegation
profile ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-child-delegation])
for a cascade-terminated Child Mission). A consumer applies the
issuance profile's forward-compatibility rule: only active permits
reliance, and every other value, recognized or not, is non-active.
This profile's reliance behavior does not depend on recognizing
these companion-defined states; the fail-safe rule above governs.¶
expires_at: the point at which the Mission itself expires, the
Mission record's expires_at
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission]).¶
fresh_until: an RFC 3339 [RFC3339] date-time giving the point
until which the consumer MAY rely on the reported state without
re-checking, governing caching (Section 3.5). It is
report-freshness metadata, carried in mission so it travels with
state even on the introspection projection, which has no signed
envelope to carry it (Section 4).¶
suspend_until, on_expiry: CONDITIONAL. Present only while the
Mission is suspended under a deadline
(Section 5): the RFC 3339 [RFC3339]
deadline, and the transition (resume or revoke) the AS applies
when it passes.¶
successor: OPTIONAL. A string, the successor mission_id. Present
only when state is superseded, giving the successor that
replaced this Mission, set atomically at supersession on the
predecessor's record
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-expansion]).¶
carried_to: CONDITIONAL string. A deployment implementing Child Mission
Carryover MUST include the committed replacement Mission identifier when
reporting the old child's cascaded state, and MUST omit it when no
replacement was committed. It is same-issuer correlation, not authority
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-child-delegation], Section
"Carryover Evidence and Observation").¶
version: REQUIRED. The Mission's state version: a strictly
monotonic per-Mission counter the Mission Issuer maintains,
incremented on each committed lifecycle transition (the approval
event is version 1) and each committed metadata-only change,
current as of the reported state. It orders observations of one
Mission across every surface: an event consumer that
re-established state through this operation re-seats its gap
detection on it (the last-applied Signals version becomes this
value, [I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-signals]), a
lifecycle mutation can guard on it (Section 5.7), and a
materialized policy view names the value it materialized
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-runtime]). Companion records carry
this same counter under their own member names:
mission_state_version in Decision Evidence
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-runtime-evidence]), prior_version
and new_version in Containment Evidence
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-containment]), prior_version
and current_version in a Discharge Result
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-discharge]), and
expected_version on a lifecycle request (Section 5.7).¶
Extension members: a companion profile MAY add further members to
this object. For example, the Status List companion adds a
status_list reference where the deployment publishes a Mission
Status List
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-status-list]).¶
authorization_details: the Authority Set entries of every
AS-supported authorization_details type
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission], Section "Authorization
Details Types") relevant to the requesting audience, audience
relevance determined per each entry's own type specification (for
the general-purpose mission_resource_access type, by its
resource member,
[I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-resource-access]), carried at
the top level as a sibling of mission (as on the token and in the
introspection response). Entries addressed to other audiences MUST NOT be disclosed. When the request omits audience
(Section 3.1), there is no requesting audience: the
response is state-only and MUST NOT carry authorization_details.¶
A consumer MUST verify, before honoring a response:¶
the JWS header typ is mission-status-response+jwt;¶
the JWS header alg is one the AS advertises in
mission_status_signing_alg_values_supported (Section 8),
rejecting none and any algorithm not listed;¶
the JWS signature against a current jwks_uri entry for the
issuer AS;¶
iss equals the expected AS issuer URL;¶
aud equals the audience the request named or, for a
state-only response, the requester's identifier
(Section 3.1);¶
sub equals the requesting client's identifier;¶
nonce equals the request's nonce;¶
mission.id equals the requested mission_id; and¶
iat is not in the future and exp is not in the past, with up to
30 seconds clock-skew tolerance.¶
Caching follows these rules:¶
Cache key. Consumers SHOULD cache a response keyed on
(mission_id, audience), or on (mission_id, requester
identifier) for a state-only response, until mission.fresh_until.¶
Hard stop. Consumers MUST NOT use a cached response after
mission.fresh_until. In particular, a consumer MUST NOT extend
reliance on a cached suspended (or any non-active) response
beyond mission.fresh_until.¶
Freshness cap. When the AS advertises
mission_max_stale_seconds (Section 8), it MUST NOT set
mission.fresh_until later than the response iat plus that
value.¶
Skew tolerance. When comparing the current time to
mission.fresh_until, a consumer MAY allow up to 30 seconds of
tolerance for the active state only, and no tolerance for any
other state. The tolerance MUST NOT exceed the AS's advertised
mission_max_stale_seconds (Section 8).¶
The freshness cap keeps report freshness within the deployment's
advertised revocation-propagation tolerance. The skew tolerance is a
clock-skew allowance on the reliance path, bounding the disagreement
between the AS's and the consumer's clocks, not a property of state
reversibility. The hard stop is absolute for non-active states
because a suspended Mission may be resumed to active.¶
A mission_id is never a bearer capability. The AS MUST authenticate
the requester and authorize it for the requested mission_id and
audience.¶
Unknown mission_id values and known-but-unauthorized references MUST
produce indistinguishable responses (HTTP 404 with a generic
not-found body; see Section 3.7). The AS MUST return an
identical HTTP status code, response body, and headers for the two
cases. The AS SHOULD NOT vary response timing in a way that
distinguishes the two cases. It SHOULD mitigate timing side channels
(for example by padding response time or by taking a uniform lookup
path for both the unknown and the unauthorized case).¶
Mission Status outcomes are of two kinds. A success outcome is a found,
visible, authorized Mission: the AS returns HTTP 200 with a signed
Mission Status Response, and the outcome is described by mission.state
in that response, not by a separate symbol. A wire error is a hard
failure: the AS returns the matching HTTP status with a JSON object
[RFC8259] body whose error member carries the symbol below.¶
Success outcomes (HTTP 200, signed Mission Status Response, described by
mission.state):¶
| mission.state | Description |
|---|---|
active
|
Mission is active and permits reliance. |
suspended
|
Mission is suspended (non-terminal). |
revoked, expired, completed, superseded, cascaded
|
Mission is in a terminal, non-active state. |
This document uses "terminated" in prose for any terminal
non-active state; it is not itself a mission.state value, and the
terminal set is not closed. The terminal row above and the list that
follows enumerate the companion-defined states this suite currently
runs, for the reader's reference; a deployment reports whichever it
runs, and a consumer's reliance decision never depends on recognizing
them. The terminal states currently defined across this suite are
revoked and expired ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission]),
completed (this document), superseded
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-expansion]), and cascaded
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-child-delegation]). The binding
rule is the issuance profile's forward-compatibility rule: every value
other than active is non-active, whether or not the consumer
recognizes it.¶
Wire error codes (carried in the error member of a JSON body):¶
| error | HTTP | Description |
|---|---|---|
invalid_request
|
400 | Malformed request: an unparseable body, a required member missing or malformed, an invalid member combination, or a retransmitted nonce paired with a request that is not byte-identical to the original (Section 5.7). |
unauthorized
|
401 | Request not authenticated. |
not_found
|
404 | Reference does not exist OR is not visible. |
conflict
|
409 | Lifecycle operation not legal from the current state (Section 5.7). |
stale_version
|
409 |
expected_version differs from the current state version (Section 5.7). |
rate_limited
|
429 | Consumer is rate-limited. |
unavailable
|
503 | AS temporarily cannot serve status. |
Note the distinction between the two access failures: unauthorized
(401) means the request carried no valid authentication, whereas a
request that is authenticated but not authorized for the referenced
Mission returns not_found (404), never 401, so that an unauthorized
reference is indistinguishable from an unknown one
(Section 3.6). The error body is:¶
The body MUST contain error and error_description, and MUST
additionally contain nonce when the request carried a well-formed
nonce. A request whose nonce is absent or malformed is refused
invalid_request with no nonce member echoed. The body MUST NOT
contain any member that would let a caller distinguish unknown from
unauthorized references. For rate_limited, the response SHOULD
include a Retry-After header [RFC9110] and a retry_after body
member in seconds.¶
The OAuth-shaped surfaces of this family, this Status and Lifecycle
endpoint, Mission Management
[I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-management], and the Mission
Authority Server's submission surface
[I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-authority-server], share the
error/error_description JSON body idiom for consistency with the
OAuth-shaped APIs they compose with. Each surface's exact member
requiredness is its own: here and in Mission Management,
error_description and nonce are REQUIRED; the Mission Authority
Server makes error_description OPTIONAL and adds the MAS-only
error_reason.¶
The body is application/json with Cache-Control:
no-store. error_description is diagnostic and is never
authorization input. nonce correlates the response to the request in
support of the signed-response and retry model of Section 5.7 and
is not, by itself, replay protection, per the absent-or-malformed-nonce
rule above. RFC 9457 [RFC9457] problem details
is neither used on these surfaces nor disparaged: the AuthZEN profile
[I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-authzen] carries it where that
ecosystem does, and a future non-OAuth-shaped HTTP API in this family
MAY choose it.¶
This section is OPTIONAL and is a thin delta over the OAuth 2.0 Token
Introspection [RFC7662] projection of
[I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission] (Section "Mission State via
Token Introspection"). That section already
defines a mission member on the introspection response carrying
id and issuer, and (from the Mission's issuer) the lifecycle
state, with authority_hash disclosed only to a caller holding
that member's disclosure privilege, together with the
caller-authorization, minimization, and issuer-only-reports-state
rules. This document does not restate those rules.¶
This extension adds the following to that projection:¶
An introspection response that carries a Mission projection is
protected by TLS, as for token introspection generally
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission], Section "Mission State via
Token Introspection"). Where the projection's integrity and provenance
need to be verifiable independently of the transport (for example
when the response transits intermediaries or is retained for audit),
the AS SHOULD return it as a [RFC9701]-signed response, advertised
through the introspection_signing_alg_values_supported metadata
that [RFC9701] registers in the [RFC8414] registry.¶
When the responding AS is the Mission's issuer, the projection MAY
additionally carry fresh_until, an RFC 3339 [RFC3339] date-time
giving the point until which the consumer MAY rely on the reported
state without re-checking, governed by the caching rule of
Section 3.5. When fresh_until is absent (for example
a non-issuer projection), the consumer MUST NOT cache the reported
state across requests and re-checks per use or relies on the
token's own lifetime.¶
This projection and the dedicated Mission Status Response
(Section 3.4) carry Mission facts in a mission object
of the same shape: the open mission claim object of
[I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission] (Section "The Mission Claim")
with status members (state, fresh_until, any companion-defined
extension member such as the Status List companion's status_list
reference ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-status-list]), and,
on the dedicated response, expires_at and version) added. This
projection populates the subset a token-holding consumer needs; the
dedicated response populates more. Either way a consumer reads the
same fact from the same place.¶
Example [RFC9701]-signed introspection response (decoded payload),
for a token whose Mission is active:¶
{
"iss": "https://as.example.com",
"aud": "https://erp.example.com",
"iat": 1793606400,
"token_introspection": {
"active": true,
"client_id": "s6BhdRkqt3",
"sub": "user_3p2q8mN1a0kV7tR",
"scope": "invoices.read",
"mission": {
"id": "msn_8RfX2Lqv9TqMv4z7sA2bN1k0YpEdHc9-",
"issuer": "https://as.example.com",
"authority_hash":
"sha-256:l3KvZ4mP5x0wQrR6tY2nD9bM7sX1cF8gH2vJ4kE5pNQ",
"state": "active",
"fresh_until": "2026-11-02T08:00:45Z"
}
}
}
¶
Per [RFC9701], the signed response is a JWT of typ
token-introspection+jwt whose [RFC7662] members, including the
mission projection, ride in the token_introspection claim; only
iss, aud, and iat are top-level.¶
A consumer holding only a mission_id, or one that needs signed
evidence independent of a specific token (an auditor or a cross-domain
Resource AS), uses the dedicated Mission Status operation
(Section 3); the introspection projection is purely a
same-call convenience for token-holding consumers and is never the
sole Mission Status path.¶
This section is OPTIONAL. The issuance profile lets the Subject,
Approver, or an administrator revoke a Mission by an authenticated,
deployment-defined means and defers a standardized management API and
the richer suspend, resume, and complete operations
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission], Section "Revocation"). This
section standardizes that management surface.¶
The AS publishes its Mission Lifecycle endpoint URL in Authorization
Server metadata (Section 8) as mission_lifecycle_endpoint,
distinct from [RFC7009] token revocation. The endpoint MUST be
served over TLS 1.2 or later (TLS 1.3 RECOMMENDED), following the
recommendations of [RFC9325].¶
Adopting this endpoint extends the issuance profile's lifecycle state
space ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission], Section "Mission
Lifecycle and Gating") with two additional states: suspended (a
non-terminal paused Mission that derives no tokens until resumed) and
completed (a terminal state recording successful completion).
Issuance gating treats any state other than active as
non-deriving, exactly as the issuance profile gates on active.¶
A transition to suspended or completed gates new derivation only.
Tokens already derived under the Mission remain valid until their own
exp, exactly as in the issuance profile's revocation model and
mirroring the treatment of superseded
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-expansion]). A deployment that
needs a prompt cutoff on outstanding tokens uses the propagation
mechanisms of Section 6.¶
Suspension is reversible, so a refresh refused for it should not spend
the client's ability to refresh after a resume. After validating a
refresh request and before consuming or rotating its refresh token,
the AS SHOULD check whether the Mission, or an ancestor whose state
gates its derivation
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-child-delegation]), is
suspended. When this check detects suspension, the AS SHOULD
refuse the request without consuming the refresh token or invalidating
its otherwise-valid grant solely because of that suspension. This
check does not replace issuance-time state validation. A concurrent
suspension can still cause issuance to be refused after the
preliminary check, and preserving refresh capability across that
interval requires coordination with the issuance commit. The check
leaves refresh-token rotation and reuse detection intact, and a
resume does not revive a credential that expired or was revoked
independently.¶
The endpoint accepts authenticated POST requests with a form-urlencoded body:¶
mission_id:REQUIRED. A string. The canonical Mission Identifier, named per the issuance profile's external-surface convention ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission]).¶
operation:REQUIRED. A string. One of revoke, suspend, resume,
complete, or a further value a companion profile registers as an
extension operation on this endpoint, such as the Entry Discharge
companion's discharge
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-discharge]).¶
reason:OPTIONAL. A string. A human-readable reason recorded in
audit, maximum 1024 characters. Not used by a companion-registered
operation that records its own request members in audit, such as
discharge ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-discharge]).¶
suspend_until:OPTIONAL. An RFC 3339 [RFC3339] date-time. Valid only on the
suspend operation. When present, it sets a deadline after which the
AS applies on_expiry.¶
on_expiry:CONDITIONAL. A string, one of resume or revoke. REQUIRED when
suspend_until is present; otherwise MUST NOT be sent. It selects the
transition the AS applies when suspend_until passes.¶
nonce:REQUIRED. A string. A client-generated nonce.¶
A companion-registered extension operation, such as discharge,
carries additional REQUIRED and OPTIONAL members of its own, defined
completely by the companion that registers it
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-discharge]).¶
The base operations are:¶
revoke: terminate the Mission; transition to revoked.¶
suspend: pause the Mission; transition to suspended.¶
resume: return a suspended Mission to active.¶
complete: mark the Mission completed; transition to completed.¶
A companion profile MAY register a further operation value on this
endpoint that changes no Mission-level state, provided it defines the
value's request members, authorization, anti-oracle behavior, and
result shape completely. The Entry Discharge companion registers
discharge this way: it commits that a completion condition has
fired, discharging a Mission-record entry, and is defined in full by
that companion ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-discharge]).¶
A suspend MAY carry suspend_until with a REQUIRED on_expiry. When
suspend_until passes, the AS MUST apply on_expiry (transition to
active for resume, or to revoked for revoke) and emit the
corresponding transition, without a further request. While the Mission
is suspended under a deadline, both suspend_until and on_expiry
surface in the signed Mission Status Response (Section 3.4)
so a consumer sees the pending outcome.¶
An operation is legal only from the source states below. A terminal
state (revoked, expired, completed, or the companion-defined
superseded and cascaded) admits no transition. An operation whose
resulting state equals the current state, terminal or not, is
idempotent success (Section 5.7). This table governs Mission-level
state; a companion-registered extension operation such as discharge
produces no Mission-state transition and is not a row of it,
following instead the entry-grain rules the Entry Discharge companion
defines ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-discharge]).¶
resume is the sole exception: it is legal only from suspended
(its resulting state, active, is also the baseline a Mission holds
before any suspension), so resume on an active or terminal
Mission is a conflict, not idempotent success.¶
| Operation | Legal from | Resulting state |
|---|---|---|
revoke
|
active, suspended
|
revoked
|
suspend
|
active
|
suspended
|
resume
|
suspended
|
active
|
complete
|
active, suspended
|
completed
|
complete is legal from suspended as well as active: completion is
a monotonic narrowing to a terminal state and needs no derivation
window, so a suspended Mission need not first be resumed to be
completed.¶
Requests are adjudicated by the single rule of Section 5.7: an
operation whose resulting state equals the Mission's current state is
idempotent success, with the resume exception above. Any other
operation not legal from the current state, including resume on a
Mission that is not suspended, is refused as a conflict. A Mission
that reaches its expires_at transitions to expired independently of
this endpoint, from active or suspended.¶
This profile owns the extension of the issuance profile's lifecycle state space ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission], Section "Mission Lifecycle and Gating"). The table below is the authoritative view of that space: every state, every transition, and the source of the event that drives it.¶
Event sources are the lifecycle endpoint (an operation
of Section 5), the expiry clock (a deadline
reached without a request), and companion adjudication (a transition a
companion profile commits). The lifecycle-endpoint rows are exactly the
Mission-state-changing operations of Section 5.2; a
companion-registered extension operation such as discharge
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-discharge]) is a
lifecycle-endpoint operation that changes no Mission state and so is
not a row of this table. Only active permits derivation; every
other state is non-deriving.¶
| From | Event | Event source | To |
|---|---|---|---|
| (none) | approval event | issuance profile |
active
|
active
|
revoke
|
lifecycle endpoint |
revoked
|
suspended
|
revoke
|
lifecycle endpoint |
revoked
|
active
|
suspend
|
lifecycle endpoint |
suspended
|
suspended
|
resume
|
lifecycle endpoint |
active
|
active
|
complete
|
lifecycle endpoint |
completed
|
suspended
|
complete
|
lifecycle endpoint |
completed
|
active
|
expires_at reached |
expiry clock |
expired
|
suspended
|
expires_at reached |
expiry clock |
expired
|
suspended
|
suspend_until reached, on_expiry = resume
|
expiry clock |
active
|
suspended
|
suspend_until reached, on_expiry = revoke
|
expiry clock |
revoked
|
active
|
successor activates | expansion profile |
superseded
|
active
|
parent reaches a terminal state | child-delegation profile |
cascaded
|
suspended
|
parent reaches a terminal state | child-delegation profile |
cascaded
|
revoke and the Mission's expires_at both apply in suspended as
well as active, so a suspended Mission can still be terminated or
expire. The superseded and cascaded rows are companion-defined and
shown here for reference:
superseded is committed by the expansion profile and requires an
active predecessor
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-expansion]); cascaded is
committed by the child-delegation profile only when a parent reaches a
terminal state. A suspended parent holds a dependent Child Mission
non-active reversibly rather than driving it to cascaded
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-child-delegation]). Neither
companion state is produced by this profile's endpoint.¶
The lifecycle endpoint uses the same authentication mechanisms as the
Mission Status endpoint (Section 3.2): mTLS client
authentication, a sender-constrained access token (DPoP- or mTLS-bound),
or private-key JWT. Its discovery mirrors that endpoint: the accepted
methods in mission_lifecycle_endpoint_auth_methods_supported and, for
private_key_jwt, the accepted client-assertion algorithms in
mission_lifecycle_endpoint_auth_signing_alg_values_supported
(Section 8).¶
For the sender-constrained access-token path, this
endpoint is an OAuth protected resource exactly as the Mission Status
endpoint is: the AS publishes, in its Protected Resource Metadata for
this resource [RFC9728], the resource identifier the token's
audience MUST name and the scopes it requires (scopes_supported):
mission_lifecycle for revoke, suspend, resume, and complete
(Section 5), and, where the deployment adopts the
Entry Discharge companion, mission_discharge as well
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-discharge]). A private-key JWT
client_assertion MUST name the mission_lifecycle_endpoint URL in
aud, and a presented access token MUST be audience-restricted to
this endpoint's protected-resource identifier, exactly as at the
Mission Status endpoint. Direct mTLS or private-key-JWT callers
continue to use the deployment-defined equivalent grant, never a
scope, exactly as a companion-registered extension operation such as
discharge does
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-discharge]).¶
Revoke request:¶
Revoke success response: the AS returns the updated status as a signed
Mission Status Response (Section 3.4). Because the
Lifecycle request carries no audience, the response is state-only: the
AS sets aud to the authenticated requester and omits
authorization_details (a lifecycle confirmation reports state, not
audience-scoped authority). Here the response envelope's sub,
distinct from any access token's sub, carries the acting party: the
calling client identified by client_id. The AS records that acting
party and reflects it in this signed response as well as in its audit
log.¶
Decoded JWS payload:¶
{
"iss": "https://as.example.com",
"aud": "client_erp-recon-agent",
"sub": "client_erp-recon-agent",
"nonce": "nonce_8Y3vN0sM6tP1xR9bQ5",
"iat": 1793609600,
"exp": 1793609660,
"mission": {
"id": "msn_8RfX2Lqv9TqMv4z7sA2bN1k0YpEdHc9-",
"issuer": "https://as.example.com",
"authority_hash":
"sha-256:l3KvZ4mP5x0wQrR6tY2nD9bM7sX1cF8gH2vJ4kE5pNQ",
"state": "revoked",
"version": 7,
"expires_at": "2026-12-31T23:59:59Z",
"fresh_until": "2026-11-02T08:54:05Z"
}
}
¶
The AS records the operation, actor, time, and any reason in its
audit log; the response confirms the outcome through the updated
state.¶
Suspend request with a deadline, here also carrying the OPTIONAL
expected_version guard against deciding over stale state
(Section 5.7):¶
Suspend success response: the signed Mission Status Response reports
suspended and surfaces the pending outcome, carrying suspend_until
and on_expiry in mission alongside state. Decoded JWS payload:¶
{
"iss": "https://as.example.com",
"aud": "client_erp-recon-agent",
"sub": "client_erp-recon-agent",
"nonce": "nonce_4Dq2mV8kX1sB7nR3tW",
"iat": 1793607600,
"exp": 1793607660,
"mission": {
"id": "msn_8RfX2Lqv9TqMv4z7sA2bN1k0YpEdHc9-",
"issuer": "https://as.example.com",
"authority_hash":
"sha-256:l3KvZ4mP5x0wQrR6tY2nD9bM7sX1cF8gH2vJ4kE5pNQ",
"state": "suspended",
"version": 6,
"suspend_until": "2026-11-09T08:15:00Z",
"on_expiry": "revoke",
"expires_at": "2026-12-31T23:59:59Z",
"fresh_until": "2026-11-02T08:20:45Z"
}
}
¶
When suspend_until passes without a resume, the AS applies
on_expiry and transitions the Mission to revoked without a further
request.¶
The request nonce (Section 5, Operations) is
the idempotency key: an opaque string of 1 to 255 characters. The AS
treats an absent, empty, longer, or non-string nonce as malformed
(invalid_request, with no nonce echoed).¶
The AS MUST deduplicate
lifecycle requests by the
triple (client, mission_id, nonce) for a bounded window. On a
retransmit carrying a nonce already seen for that client and
mission_id, together with a request byte-identical to the original,
the AS MUST replay the original response rather than re-execute the
operation. The same nonce paired with a request that is not
byte-identical to the original MUST be refused invalid_request
(Section 3.7); the AS MUST NOT answer it with the
unrelated original response.¶
The window MUST be at least the validity
span of the signed response the AS would replay (its iat to exp,
Section 3.4), so any retransmit that could still
present a live response is deduplicated. A deployment MAY use a longer
window. This makes a retransmit safe against reordering: a
delayed suspend retry that arrives after a resume is recognized as
a duplicate and replays the original suspend response, so it cannot
re-suspend an already-resumed Mission.¶
Deduplication guards a retransmitted request; it does not guard a
valid request decided over stale state, a fresh suspend issued from
a console that has not yet seen a newer resume. For that a
lifecycle request MAY carry expected_version, the state version
(Section 3.4) the caller last observed: when present,
the AS MUST refuse the operation with HTTP 409 and error symbol
stale_version, leaving the Mission unchanged, when the Mission's
current state version differs. A deployment SHOULD require
expected_version on the operations it classifies high-risk. The
nonce remains the replay key; the two guards are independent, one
against duplicate delivery, one against stale decisions.¶
Lifecycle operations that change Mission state follow one rule. An
operation whose resulting state (Section 5.2) equals the
Mission's current state is idempotent success, terminal or not: the AS
returns the current Mission Status Response, with no state change and
no event emitted. Any other operation not legal from the current state
(for example suspend against a terminal state) is a conflict: the AS
MUST refuse it with HTTP 409 and a JSON body whose error symbol is
conflict, leaving the Mission state unchanged. A companion-registered
extension operation that changes no Mission state, such as discharge,
is not bound by this rule; its own idempotency and outcome vocabulary
are defined by the companion that registers it, for discharge by the
Entry Discharge companion
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-discharge]).¶
resume is the sole exception to the idempotent-success arm. It is
legal only from suspended, and its resulting state active is also
the baseline a Mission holds before any suspension, so resume on an
active Mission (one never suspended, or already resumed) or on a
terminal Mission is not idempotent success but a conflict.¶
One idempotent case carries metadata. A suspend against a
suspended Mission whose suspend_until or on_expiry differ from
the recorded values MUST update the recorded values, emitting the
corresponding transition-metadata change and reporting the updated
values in the response; silent acceptance without effect is not
conforming.¶
A Mission revocation through this endpoint cascades to credentials
derived from the Mission per the AS's advertised revocation
propagation (Section 6). The AS MAY additionally invoke
[RFC7009] token revocation for specific outstanding tokens when it
knows their jti. [RFC7009] alone does NOT revoke a Mission; the
lifecycle endpoint is the authoritative Mission state change.¶
This endpoint operates on one Mission at a time. Mission enumeration and bulk lifecycle operations for incident response, such as revoking every Mission for a compromised Subject, client, or tenant, are specified separately by Mission Management [I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-management]; this document does not require them.¶
The following capabilities remain deferred to future work:¶
This section is OPTIONAL. The issuance profile bounds outstanding self-contained tokens by their lifetime and OPTIONAL token introspection ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission], Section "Revocation"). A deployment that needs a Mission state change to take effect faster than token lifetime alone combines the propagation mechanisms this suite offers and sizes token lifetimes to match.¶
The mechanisms are each discovered from their own metadata, not from a separate posture list:¶
consulting Mission state at each derivation event (the token endpoint, refresh, Token Exchange), the issuance profile's always-present baseline, which does not invalidate already-issued self-contained tokens;¶
token introspection (Section 4), which returns
active: false for a token whose Mission state disallows use even
before the token expires, discovered from introspection_endpoint
and introspection_signing_alg_values_supported;¶
the Mission Status operation (Section 3) for per-request
state checks by high-assurance Resource Servers, discovered from
mission_status_endpoint; and¶
event-driven propagation of state changes over a Shared Signals
stream ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-signals]), discovered
from mission_event_stream_endpoint.¶
A deployment advertises mission_max_stale_seconds (Section 8),
the maximum interval it tolerates for a Mission state change to take
effect, so a consumer can size token lifetimes and choose propagation
mechanisms to match. When the member is absent, no propagation bound
is declared: a consumer MUST size reliance to token lifetime alone
and MUST NOT assume a tighter bound.¶
Where the member is present, a status response's mission.fresh_until
MUST NOT exceed the response's issuance time plus the advertised
bound: the advertisement is the ceiling on every reliance window
built from these surfaces, including a runtime permit's validity
window, which is capped by the state view's freshness. As sizing
guidance, the runtime enforcement profile's recommended defaults
target an effective bound under 300 seconds for the high-consequence
classes; the 60-second value in this document's examples is a tight
deployment's choice, not a floor.¶
Where Mission revocation must take effect but only the baseline
derivation-time check is in use, Mission-bound access tokens SHOULD use
TTLs no longer than the declared mission_max_stale_seconds.
Deployments where revocation propagates out of band (token
introspection, per-request status checks, or the event stream) MAY use
longer TTLs.¶
Sizing to the bound is itself a propagation mechanism: expiry performs the state check, and the consumer integrates nothing (the runtime profile names this token-lifetime freshness for the classes below its high-consequence floor). Introspection and per-request status checks tighten specific paths; they are upgrades, not prerequisites.¶
A deployment declaring revocation propagation SHOULD publish the recovery
objective considered when choosing mission_max_stale_seconds and the
availability consequence when recovery takes longer than that bound.¶
The security ceiling governs the choice: an operational recovery objective never authorizes extending a published freshness horizon during an incident. An existing observation's remaining validity is not reset when an outage is detected. An issuer outage and a state-source outage are distinct where the topology provides an independently available authoritative source. Runtime's Operational Considerations gives the per-action-class dependency analysis ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-runtime]).¶
The deployment describes its distribution posture per surface: Status
responses are reused only to their authenticated fresh_until and other
applicable bounds; Status Lists are fetched within their freshness window
and checked locally; Signals accelerate learning of transitions over a
correctly bounded state source, not replace that source after confidence
is lost. The Status List freshness rules
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-status-list]) and Signals' Missed
Events Are Not Fail-Open rule
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-signals]) remain authoritative.¶
Operators watch observation age and remaining validity, failed refreshes, stream gaps, fallback availability, clock health, and catch-up after recovery. A recovery check reconciles committed state and versions before publishing newly fresh observations. A successful HTTP response or a new signature alone does not establish that reconciliation. No new endpoint, metadata member, availability target, or replication protocol is defined here.¶
This section is OPTIONAL and applies only to a deployment that adopts
one or more of the extensions above. An AS advertises the surfaces it
supports through the following members of its Authorization Server
metadata document [RFC8414], in addition to the issuance profile's
mission_bound_authorization_supported
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission], Section "Authorization Server
Metadata"). Unlike the issuance profile, which advertises only that
boolean, this document defines OAuth AS metadata members for the
endpoints and classes it introduces, so a consumer discovers them
through standard [RFC8414] discovery.¶
mission_status_endpoint:OPTIONAL. A string containing a URL. The URL of the dedicated Mission Status operation (Section 3). Present when the AS supports it.¶
mission_status_endpoint_auth_methods_supported:OPTIONAL. A JSON array of strings naming the authentication methods
the Mission Status endpoint (Section 3) accepts. Its value
space is a closed set defined by this document, not the OAuth Token
Endpoint Authentication Methods registry: tls_client_auth
(mutual-TLS client authentication [RFC8705]), private_key_jwt
(private-key JWT client authentication [RFC7523]), and access_token
(a mission_status-scoped, sender-constrained access token, whose
presentation and DPoP or mTLS binding are described by this endpoint's
Protected Resource Metadata [RFC9728]). The first two values are
spelled identically to registered token-endpoint authentication
methods by intent; this member describes this endpoint, not the token
endpoint. Present, and SHOULD be advertised, when the AS serves the
Mission Status endpoint.¶
mission_status_endpoint_auth_signing_alg_values_supported:OPTIONAL. A JSON array of strings, the JWS [RFC7515] algorithm
values the AS accepts for the private_key_jwt client-assertion JWT
(Section 3.2) at the Mission Status endpoint.
This is the client-assertion verification set, not the response-signing
algorithms of mission_status_signing_alg_values_supported below.
none MUST NOT be used. Present when that endpoint lists
private_key_jwt.¶
mission_status_signing_alg_values_supported:OPTIONAL. A JSON array of strings. The JWS [RFC7515] algorithm
values the AS uses to sign the Mission Status Response shape
(Section 3.4), on whichever surfaces of this
profile family serve it (the dedicated Mission Status operation,
the Lifecycle endpoint, and Mission Management), mirroring
introspection_signing_alg_values_supported. These are the
response-signing algorithms, not the algorithms the AS accepts on
private_key_jwt client assertions (the endpoint auth-signing
members). Present when the AS serves any such surface.¶
mission_lifecycle_endpoint:OPTIONAL. A string containing a URL. The URL of the Mission Lifecycle endpoint (Section 5). Present when the AS supports it.¶
mission_lifecycle_endpoint_auth_methods_supported:OPTIONAL. A JSON array of strings naming the authentication methods
the Mission Lifecycle endpoint (Section 5)
accepts, from the same closed value space as
mission_status_endpoint_auth_methods_supported (with access_token
naming a mission_lifecycle-scoped access token). Present, and SHOULD
be advertised, when the AS serves the Mission Lifecycle endpoint.¶
mission_lifecycle_endpoint_auth_signing_alg_values_supported:OPTIONAL. A JSON array of strings, the JWS [RFC7515] algorithm
values the AS accepts for the private_key_jwt client-assertion JWT
(Section 3.2) at the Mission Lifecycle endpoint.
This is the client-assertion verification set, not the response-signing
algorithms of mission_status_signing_alg_values_supported.
none MUST NOT be used. Present when that endpoint lists
private_key_jwt.¶
mission_max_stale_seconds:OPTIONAL. An integer. The maximum tolerated interval, in seconds, for revocation propagation (Section 6). When absent, no bound is declared, and a consumer sizes reliance to token lifetime alone.¶
When an endpoint's *_auth_methods_supported member is absent, the
methods that endpoint accepts are known only by out-of-band
configuration; token_endpoint_auth_methods_supported [RFC8414]
describes the token endpoint alone and is never read in its place.¶
DPoP and mTLS support for issued credentials are read from the
standard dpop_signing_alg_values_supported [RFC9449] and
tls_client_certificate_bound_access_tokens [RFC8705] metadata;
this document defines no separate sender-constraint member. When the
introspection projection (Section 4) is signed, the
signing is discovered through the standard
introspection_signing_alg_values_supported metadata.¶
A discovery response from
https://as.example.com/.well-known/oauth-authorization-server,
showing the issuance profile members plus the extension members of
this document:¶
An implementation conforms to the issuance profile [I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission] or implements the Mission Issuer role of a binding that serves these surfaces, such as the standalone Mission Authority Server [I-D.draft-mcguinness-mission-authority-server]. Each extension in this document is independently OPTIONAL; an implementation names the ones it supports (for example, "issuance profile with Mission Status and Mission Lifecycle"), and an implementation that supports none of them is still a conforming issuance profile.¶
An implementation claiming an extension MUST meet its requirements:¶
Mission Status: serve the dedicated Mission Status operation
(Section 3) with JWS-signed responses
(application/mission-status-response+jwt), the authentication and
read authorization of Section 3.2, the
anti-oracle property
(Section 3.6), and the error shape of
Section 3.7; and advertise mission_status_endpoint and
mission_status_endpoint_auth_methods_supported.¶
Introspection projection: carry the Mission projection on the introspection response (Section 4), returning it as a [RFC9701]-signed response where end-to-end integrity is required.¶
Mission Lifecycle: serve the management endpoint
(Section 5), gate the suspended and
completed states it introduces exactly as the issuance profile gates
on non-active state, and advertise mission_lifecycle_endpoint and
mission_lifecycle_endpoint_auth_methods_supported.¶
Revocation propagation: advertise mission_max_stale_seconds
and size Mission-bound access-token TTLs to it
(Section 6).¶
A companion profile MAY register a further extension operation on the
Mission Lifecycle endpoint and carry its own conformance requirements;
the Entry Discharge companion's terminal_when and discharge
capability is conformant to its own document, not to this one
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-discharge]).¶
An implementation meets the following requirement independent of which extensions above it claims, and independent of which companion profiles it adopts. Every issuer-held narrowing mechanism a deployment runs, an adopted companion's discharge mechanism or another companion profile's own overlay alike, MUST feed the single Effective Authority Set computation. Every derivation and every authority-reporting surface MUST use that same computation; no mechanism computes a parallel view, and no surface reports authority the computation has not reduced.¶
The security considerations of the issuance profile [I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission] apply in full. This section covers threats specific to the extensions defined here.¶
Per the anti-oracle property (Section 3.6), the AS
MUST NOT let a caller readily distinguish an unknown mission_id from a
known-but-unauthorized one at the Status or Lifecycle endpoint. The
error shape of Section 3.7 requires identical body
content, identical HTTP status, and identical headers between the two
cases, and the AS SHOULD additionally suppress timing side channels
(for example by padding response time or by taking a uniform lookup
path). An implementation that leaks the distinction exposes the Mission
space to enumeration.¶
A Mission Status Response is bound to (caller sub, audience,
nonce, issuance time). Replay against a different caller or audience,
or beyond mission.fresh_until, is detectable by signature
verification and by verifying the bindings; a consumer MUST verify all
the checks of Section 3.4 before honoring a response. A
response cached and replayed by the same caller within
mission.fresh_until is equivalent to a fresh response; a consumer MUST NOT use a cached response after mission.fresh_until, with the skew
tolerance of Section 3.5.¶
The Mission Status operation is on the consumption path of every
Mission-bound credential validation in deployments where consumers query
Mission Status per request.
The AS MUST implement per-consumer rate limiting (returning
rate_limited, Section 3.7) and SHOULD encourage
consumer-side caching (Section 3.5) to reduce traffic.¶
When the introspection projection is signed
(Section 4), it uses [RFC9701], which is scoped to
token introspection. The dedicated Mission Status operation uses a new
media type (application/mission-status-response+jwt, Section 12) and a
JWS [RFC7515], because [RFC9701] does not apply to a lookup keyed by
mission_id. Implementations MUST NOT use [RFC9701] for the
dedicated Mission Status operation, and MUST NOT accept an unsigned
response from the dedicated Mission Status operation in place of the
signed form it requires.¶
The AS signs Mission Status and Lifecycle responses with a key from
its jwks_uri. The AS MUST keep the public JWK for every kid it
has signed such a response under resolvable in its jwks_uri for at
least the Mission record retention period, so an archived
application/mission-status-response+jwt remains verifiable for
audit and dispute. This is the issuance profile's retired-key rule
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission]), with the record retention
period as the bound. A key known or suspected
compromised is the exception: the AS removes it, and the Mandate
profile's compromise-time rule governs how artifacts signed under it
are then classified.¶
This document inherits OAuth 2.0 Best Current Practice [RFC9700] for the OAuth surfaces it composes with; implementers MUST follow current OAuth security guidance.¶
The privacy considerations of the issuance profile [I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission] apply in full. This section covers privacy specific to the extensions here.¶
The Mission Status operation (Section 3) and the
introspection projection (Section 4) disclose
Mission state and the audience-scoped authorization_details to the
authenticated, authorized requester, and MAY additionally disclose
authority_hash to a requester authorized for it. A deployment MUST
treat both as Mission information-disclosure surfaces with the same
privacy posture, audience-filtering the disclosed authority so a
consumer never sees entries addressed to audiences it is not
authorized to request (Section 3.1,
Section 3.4).¶
The AS records Status and Lifecycle requests (containing
mission_id, audience, caller, and timing) in audit logs.
Deployments MUST treat these logs as PII sinks per the issuance
profile's privacy considerations.¶
This document requests IANA actions for OAuth AS metadata members and
a media type. It defines no new registry of its own: the endpoint
authentication-method value space is a closed set defined inline
(Section 8). A companion profile MAY register further extension
members or Common Constraints against a family registry; the Entry
Discharge companion registers terminal_when in the Mission Resource
Access Profile's Mission Common Constraints registry this way
([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission-discharge]).¶
IANA is requested to register one media type per [RFC6838].¶
Type name: application¶
Subtype name: mission-status-response+jwt¶
Required parameters: none¶
Optional parameters: none¶
Encoding considerations: binary; JWS Compact Serialization¶
Security considerations: see Section 10¶
Interoperability considerations: see this document¶
Published specification: this document¶
Applications that use this media type: OAuth Mission-Bound consumers¶
Fragment identifier considerations: not applicable¶
Restrictions on usage: none¶
Provisional registration: no¶
Magic number(s): none¶
File extension(s): none¶
Macintosh file type code(s): none¶
Person & email address to contact: Karl McGuinness public@karlmcguinness.com¶
Intended usage: COMMON¶
Author/Change controller: IETF¶
This document requests registration of two states in the issuance profile's Mission Lifecycle States registry ([I-D.draft-mcguinness-oauth-mission]), under that registry's Specification Required policy:¶
| Value | Terminal | Semantics | Change Controller | Reference |
|---|---|---|---|---|
suspended
|
no | A paused Mission that derives no tokens until resumed. | IETF | this document, Section 5 |
completed
|
yes | Records successful completion of the Mission. | IETF | this document, Section 5 |
This document registers no new Well-Known URI. The metadata members of
Section 8 are added to the OAuth Authorization Server Metadata
document at /.well-known/oauth-authorization-server [RFC8414].¶
The author thanks the implementers and reviewers of the Mission-Bound Authorization work for feedback that shaped these extensions.¶
[[ To be removed from the final specification ]]¶
A caller may request the projection for an audience other than its
own, such as each resource a Mission Issuance Grant consuming
Authorization Server serves, only where the Mission Issuer's
configuration authorizes it; the consumer checks aud against the
audience its request named (#963).¶
The mutual-TLS method value is tls_client_auth, the registered
[RFC8705] spelling, and an absent endpoint auth-methods member is
never read from token-endpoint metadata. The Mission Authority Server
publishes the same per-endpoint members.¶
A refresh against a suspended Mission is checked, and refused, before
its refresh token is consumed, so a resume restores refresh with the
same token; issuance-time validation still governs a concurrent
suspension (#914).¶
Added conditional carryover correlation on an old child's cascaded observation; no state or authority is inferred from the pointer (#576).¶
Operational Considerations added (#310): recovery sizing for the advertised propagation ceiling, the per-surface distribution posture, and the operator observations after a degraded surface recovers. No freshness window is extended and no member is added.¶