alt Hacker NewsI am very curious how many MCP servers will actually implement all of this:
"MCP authorization today is built around a person approving access in a browser. That works well for interactive clients, but more and more of the callers are agents running as cloud workloads with their own identity, acting on behalf of a user who isn’t present, or delegating narrower authority to sub-agents. We want MCP servers to have a standardized way to recognize and trust those agent identities, built on existing standards rather than pasted API keys and long-lived tokens.
The work here covers finalizing Demonstrating Proof of Possession (DPoP) and driving its adoption, and defining an opinionated path for agent identity and delegation through Workload Identity Federation, the ID-JAG grant behind Enterprise-Managed Authorization, and standard token exchange. We will also continue to grow our engagement with the OAuth standards bodies, including the IETF OAuth and WIMSE working groups, to help the underlying standards evolve with the building blocks that agent identity needs."
Replies
Authorization for sub-entities is what is needed.
Having to define what an agent can do when it identifies on my behalf is cumbersome, especially when you start to get specialised agents.
Pattern based would be too easy for AI to game, but there's got to be a service independent way to limit permissions based on role.
I am Jack's right ear - awesome you get to hear stuff.
I am jack's right hand - great you get to input stuff.
Hopefully quite a few.
I really love the idea of fully enabled agents and being able to cut down on human in the loop moments.
Things like https://projects.dev/ for example.
A ton of security problems and others to solve but it's still where I want the future of all this to go.
Why, directionally all of them. What they say is obviously true. Having to manually click things in the browser is a bottleneck and will be less and less acceptable for serious users.
And the individual work attached to making that transition will be done by agents.
agree. it seems there are two streams and they could diverge or converge?
1. workloads use existing credentials support RFC 7523 and OIDC discovery, 'trust the trust (credentials) which has already been established'. basically extend current dominant NHI paradigm.
2. DPoP mandate a signed proof for each request. so tie credential to a client-held key and specific request detail or context. viable to do at scale with #1, or does it diverge (e.g. because most #1 methods as most are not designed for DPoP?
I've been working on a protocol that promises all of that and more. We're currently targeting a NOSTR/Buzz demo in the coming week as a proof of concept.
Even now, the mcp server itself doesn't have to implement all of the possible security options. You can use something like agentgateway to act as an auth proxy for your mcp servers.
Such an example of overengineering, why not just use OAuth?
I think the spec overcomplicates everything honestly. Its not that hard to add a long running auth token and put it in the MCP config as a header to send along and then avoid all the extra special rules.
"Oh no it's a long lived token that's bad"
Put it in a secret manager like 1pw cli and now start an agent...