UMA Trust Model

Abstract

This document explores the expectations and responsibilities of various parties interoperating in the User-Managed Access (UMA) context, with an overall goal of facilitating legal enforceability of any agreements made between authorizing users and requesting parties in the granting of access authorization.

Status

This document is a product of the User-Managed Access Work Group. It is currently under active development. Its latest version can always be found here. See the Change History at the end of this document for its revision number.

Editors

• Susan Morrow
• Eve Maler

Intellectual Property Notice

The User-Managed Access Work Group operates under Kantara IPR Policy - Option Patent & Copyright: Reciprocal Royalty Free with Opt-Out to Reasonable And Non discriminatory (RAND) and the publication of this document is governed by the policies outlined in this option.

Table of Contents

Introduction

UMA is a protocol that describes a technical "contract" for HTTP-based interactions (such as standardized request and response messages involving standardized data formats) among compliant software entities. The entities fill various roles in order to achieve "user-managed access" to Web resources. The following diagram illustrates the high-level goal of UMA.

The following diagram illustrates the high-level architecture UMA uses to achieve its goal.

Software Endpoints vs. Legally Responsible Parties

Software entities are frequently known as endpoints. The UMA endpoints are:

• Authorizing user (the "user" in User-Managed Access), operating a "user agent" such as a browser in order to interact with the other software in the UMA ecosystem – sometimes the software endpoint is just called the "user" for short
• Authorization manager (AM)
• Host (of "protected resources")
• Requester

Because software is just a tool and can