Draft Charter 2021

Owned by Alec Laws
Last updated: Jun 15, 2021
4 min read

(1) WG NAME: (and any acronym or abbreviation of the name): The WG name, acronym and abbreviation must not include trademarks not owned by the Organization, or content that is infringing, harmful, or inappropriate.

User-Managed Access (UMA) Work Group

(2) PURPOSE: Please provide a clear statement of purpose and justification why the proposed WG is necessary.

The UMA 2.0 Recommendations define a) a means for a client, representing a requesting party, to use a permission ticket to request an OAuth 2.0 access token to gain access to a protected resource asynchronously from the time a resource owner authorizes access and b) a means for an UMA-enabled authorization server and resource server to be loosely coupled, or federated, in a secure and authorized resource owner context.

The purpose of this Work Group is:

  • To maintain the UMA specifications and consider developing enhancements to and any future versions of them

    • For example, to consider whether extension and profile proposals contributed to the Work Group should result in Work Group deliverables

  • To develop Business Model reports and/or specifications that support the enablement of a license-based model for controlling access rights to personal digital assets, in liaison with other relevant bodies

    • For example, working with Kantara and external consent-oriented work groups. Such as the Kantara Advanced Notice & Consent Receipt work group

  • To promote UMA adoption

    • For example, by offering support for profiling and extension creation and creating educational materials

    • For example, by maintaining the UMA Implementer's Guide

  • To promote interoperability of independent implementations of UMA


(3) SCOPE: Explain the scope and definition of the planned work.

Deliverables must meet the following core design principles:

  • Simple: Simple to understand, implement in an interoperable fashion, and deploy on an Internet-wide scale

  • OAuth: OAuth-based to the extent possible (while contributing bug reports and RFEs around extensibility, security, and privacy to the IETF OAuth group)

  • ID-agnostic: Agnostic as to the identifier systems used in an individual's various services on the web, in order to allow for deployment in "today's Web"

  • RESTful: Resource-oriented (for example, as suggested by the REST architectural style) and operating natively on the Web to the extent possible

  • Modular: Modular (e.g., incorporating other existing specifications by reference where appropriate, and breaking down this Work Group's draft specifications into multiple pieces where reuse by different communities is likely)

  • Generative: Generative (able to be combined and extended to support a variety of use cases and emerging application functionality)

  • Fast: Developed rapidly, in an "agile specification" process that can refactor for emerging needs

They must also meet the following additional design principles:

  • Cryptography: Avoid adding cryptography burdens as part of the Simple principle

  • Privacy: Protect the privacy of the resource owner and requesting party

  • Distributed ecosystems: Complexity should be borne by the authorization server vs. the resource server or client, if possible

  • Authentication: Stay out of the authentication business as much as possible

  • User experience: ease of end-user experience should inform UMA’s protocol design

They must also meet the following functional requirements:

  • Support the notion of a distinct online service for managing data-sharing and service- and device-access relationships ("access relationships" for short) between an individual and other parties that request such access

  • Allow a person (individual or legal person) to select policies and enforceable contract terms that govern access, as well as data storage, further usage, and further sharing on the part of requesting services

  • Allow a person to conduct short-term and long-term management of access relationships, including modifying the conditions of access or terminating the relationship entirely

  • Allow a person to audit and monitor various aspects of access relationships

  • Allow requesting services to interact directly with responding services in a fashion guided by policy while an individual is offline, reserving real-time user approval for extraordinary circumstances

  • Allow requesting services to interact with multiple responding services associated with the same individual

(4) DRAFT TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS: List Working Titles of draft Technical Specifications to be produced (if any), projected completion dates, and the Standards Setting Organization(s) to which they will be submitted upon approval by the Membership.

The following technical specifications may be developed in 2021:

  • One or more extension and/or profile specifications

    • A Relationship and Policy Management Extension, defining the “out of scope” interfaces of the UMA Federated Authorization specification

    • A Resource Definitions Extension, enabling resource discovery through AS-first client interactions

  • Updates to the UMA 2.0 specifications as warranted

(5) OTHER DRAFT RECOMMENDATIONS: Other Draft Recommendations and projected completion dates for submission for All Member Ballot.

The following reports are anticipated to be developed in 2021 (final titles and document boundaries to be determined):

  • Business model-related reports

  • A horizontal UMA security profile, considering other profiles including HEART, FAPI, and OAuth 2.1
  • Analysis of new authorization profiles, such as GNAP

  • Analysis of UMA deployments or deployment profiles

(6) LEADERSHIP: Proposed WG Chair and Editor(s) (if any) subject to confirmation by a vote of the WG Participants.

At the time of this charter’s revision, following are the members of the leadership team:

  • Chair: Alec Laws, IDENTOS

  • Vice-chair: Steve Venema, Forgerock

  • Graphics and User Experience Editor: Domenico Catalano, Oracle

  • Implementations Coordinator: Maciej Machulak, HSBC

(7) AUDIENCE: Anticipated audience or users of the work.

The anticipated audience for the documents produced by this Work Group includes developers, deployers, and designers of digital services, including IoT device ecosystems, that act on behalf of natural and legal persons, including legal representatives of organizations operating such services.

(8) DURATION: Objective criteria for determining when the work of the WG has been completed (or a statement that the WG is intended to be a standing WG to address work that is expected to be ongoing).

This is intended to be a standing Work Group to address work that is expected to be ongoing.

(9) IPR POLICY: The Organization approved Intellectual Property Rights Policy under which the WG will operate.

Kantara IPR Policy - Option Patent & Copyright: Reciprocal Royalty Free with Opt-Out to Reasonable And Non discriminatory (RAND) (HTML version)

10) RELATED WORK AND LIAISONS: Related work being done in other WGs or other organizations and any proposed liaison with those other WGs or organizations.

This Work Group has a number of dependencies on, and shared goals with, the output of other efforts. The Kantara groups and external efforts with which this Work Group intends to liaise informally include (but are not limited to):

  • Kantara Advanced Notice & Consent Receipt

  • OpenID Foundation HEART Work Group

  • OpenID Foundation FAPI Work Group
  • Financial Data Exchange

  • Open Identity Exchange

  • IETF OAuth Working Group

  • IETF GNAP Working Group
  • Decentralized Identity Foundation
  • Trust over IP Foundation
  • Me2B Alliance