Network Working Group E. Pot
Internet-Draft May 02, 2019
Intended status: Standards Track
Expires: November 3, 2019

Link relationship types for authentication
draft-pot-authentication-link-00

Abstract

This specification defines a set of relationships that may be used to indicate where a user may authenticate, log out, register a new account or find out who is currently authenticated.

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1. Introduction

[RFC8288] defines a framework and registry for Link Relationships types. This specification defines a set of new relationship types to aid clients in discovering endpoints for authentication and registration: authenticate, authenticated-as, logout and register-user.

2. authenticate

The authenticate can be used to link to a resource that hosts a page where a user can authenticate itself for the current resource.

For example, this link might refer to a HTML login page.

Example:

<a href="/login" rel="authenticate">Login</a>

This specification doesn’t define the authentication protocol. For example, the link could refer to an OAuth2 authorization endpoint.

3. authenticated-as

The authenticated-as link refers to a resource that describes the effective authenticated user for a HTTP response.

Following this link might allow a client to answer the question ‘who am I?’. This might link to a user profile page, or it might link to an API that returns a JSON response with user information.

Example:

Link: <https://api.example.org/users/123-abc>; rel="authenticated-as"

4. logout

The logout refers to a resource where an authenticated user might end their session.

In a browser this might clear cookies, or in the case of OAuth2 it could revoke any active authentication tokens.

5. register-user

The register-user Link Relation refers to a resource where a user might sign up for a service for the context URI.

The linked resource might contain a HTML registration form, or otherwise instructions that allow a client to find out how to sign up for the service.

6. IANA considerations

This document defines authenticate, authenticated-as, logout and register-user link relation types and adds them to the “Link Relations” registry:

6.1. authenticate link relation

6.2. authenticated-as link relation

6.3. logout link relation

6.4. register-user link relation

7. Normative References

[RFC8288] Nottingham, M., "Web Linking", RFC 8288, DOI 10.17487/RFC8288, October 2017.

Appendix A. Changelog

A.1. Changes since -00

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Author's Address

Evert Pot EMail: me@evertpot.com URI: https://evertpot.com/

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