AppSec Europe 2018

Such is the frustration of the development community with SAML, that most new projects requiring access control turn to OAuth. Yet the goals of the OAuth are completely different to SAML’s: the former gives the end user control over who has access to their resources, while the latter is mainly used to enforce compliance to security policy. Most projects need both, so vendors are building ad-hoc extensions to their authorization servers to meet the need for mandatory access control, many of which are RBAC-based. The emerging consensus on these extensions should, on the one hand, find its way into standards in the short term. In the long term, on the other hand, the industry would benefit from moving beyond RBAC, but this requires further attention from researchers and vendors and, eventually, standardization bodies.