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Transaction Tokens#

IETF 124 (Montreal) digest Program Core pick Montreal · 1–7 November 2025

Draft Slides Session recording Materials

Atul Tulshibagwale, George Fletcher, Pieter Kasselman — OAuth WG document, post-WGLC

  • Why: The OAuth-side complement to WIMSE: maintaining immutable user identity, workload identity, and authorization context across a call chain inside a trust domain, enabling down-scoping at the edge and finer-grained authorization per hop.
  • What: Txn-Tokens — tokens internal to a trust boundary that carry subject, context, and authorization details through a multi-service call chain, shared across workloads processing the request.
  • How: Processing post-WGLC feedback: the purp claim became scope, the Txn-Token HTTP header is registered with an empty type in the HTTP fields registry, and an internal flow diagram was added. Open issues: request-context validation and replacement-token semantics (replacement process, lifetime extension, whether tctx can be modified). Implementations exist: Keycloak and Tokenetes (CNCF sandbox).
  • Where applicable: Microservice/API call chains within a single trusted domain. Mature WG document close to publication.