A Comprehensive Formal Security Analysis of OAuth 2.0

Abstract

The OAuth 2.0 protocol is one of the most widely deployed authorization/single sign-on (SSO) protocols and also serves as the foundation for the new SSO standard OpenID Connect. Despite the popularity of OAuth, so far analysis efforts were mostly targeted at finding bugs in specific implementations and were based on formal models which abstract from many web features or did not provide a formal treatment at all. In this paper, we carry out the first extensive formal analysis of the OAuth 2.0 standard in an expressive web model. Our analysis aims at establishing strong authorization, authentication, and session integrity guarantees, for which we provide formal definitions. In our formal analysis, all four OAuth grant types (authorization code grant, implicit grant, resource owner password credentials grant, and the client credentials grant) are covered. They may even run simultaneously in the same and different relying parties and identity providers, where malicious relying parties, identity providers, and browsers are considered as well. Our modeling and analysis of the OAuth 2.0 standard assumes that security recommendations and best practices are followed in order to avoid obvious and known attacks.