proposals: user objects for revoking refresh tokens and merging accounts

Documentation/proposals/user-object.md

+# Proposal: user objects for revoking refresh tokens and merging accounts
+
+Certain operations require tracking users the have logged in through the server
+and storing them in the backend. Namely, allowing end users to revoke refresh
+tokens and merging existing accounts with upstream providers.
+
+While revoking refresh tokens is relatively easy, merging accounts is a
+difficult problem. What if display names or emails are different? What happens
+to a user with two remote identities with the same upstream service? Should
+this be presented differently for a user with remote identities for different
+upstream services? This proposal only covers a minimal merging implementation
+by guaranteeing that merged accounts will always be presented to clients with
+the same user ID.
+
+This proposal defines the following objects and methods to be added to the
+storage package to allow user information to be persisted.
+
+```go
+// User is an end user which has logged in to the server.
+//
+// Users do not hold additional data, such as emails, because claim information
+// is always supplied by an upstream provider during the auth flow. The ID is
+// the only information from this object which overrides the claims produced by
+// connectors.
+//
+// Clients which wish to associate additional data with a user must do so on
+// their own. The server only guarantees that IDs will be constant for an end
+// user, no matter what backend they use to login.
+type User struct {
+	// A string which uniquely identifies the user for the server. This overrides
+	// the ID provided by the connector in the ID Token claims.
+	ID string
+
+	// A list of clients who have been issued refresh tokens for this user.
+	//
+	// When a refresh token is redeemed, the server will check this field to
+	// ensure that the client is still on this list. To revoke a client,
+	// remove it from here.
+	AuthorizedClients []AuthorizedClient
+
+	// A set of remote identities which are able to login as this user.
+	RemoteIdentities []RemoteIdentity
+}
+
+// AuthorizedClient is a client that has a refresh token out for this user.
+type AuthorizedClient struct {
+	// The ID of the client.
+	ClientID string
+	// The last time a token was refreshed.
+	LastRefreshed time.Time
+}
+
+// RemoteIdentity is the smallest amount of information that identifies a user
+// with a remote service. It indicates which remote identities should be able
+// to login as a specific user.
+//
+// RemoteIdentity contains an username so an end user can be displayed this
+// object and reason about what upstream profile it represents. It is not used
+// to cache claims, such as groups or emails, because these are always provided
+// by the upstream identity system during login.
+type RemoteIdentity struct {
+	// The ID of the connector used to login the user.
+	ConnectorID string
+	// A string which uniquely identifies the user with the remote system.
+	ConnectorUserID stirng
+
+	// Optional, human readable name for this remote identity. Only used when
+	// displaying the remote identity to the end user (e.g. when merging
+	// accounts). NOT used for determining ID Token claims.
+	Username string
+}
+```
+
+`UserID` fields will be added to the `AuthRequest`, `AuthCode` and `RefreshToken`
+structs. When a user logs in successfully through a connector
+[here](https://github.com/coreos/poke/blob/95a61454b522edd6643ced36b9d4b9baa8059556/server/handlers.go#L227),
+the server will attempt to either get the user, or create one if none exists with
+the remote identity.
+
+`AuthorizedClients` serves two roles. First is makes displaying the set of
+clients a user is logged into easy. Second, because we don't assume multi-object
+transactions, we can't ensure deleting all refresh tokens a client has for a
+user. Between listing the set of refresh tokens and deleting a token, a client
+may have already redeemed the token and created a new one.
+
+When an OAuth2 client exchanges a code for a token, the following steps are
+taken to populate the `AuthorizedClients`:
+
+1. Get token where the user has authorized the `offline_access` scope.
+1. Update the user checking authorized clients. If client is not in the list,
+add it.
+1. Create a refresh token and return the token.
+
+When a OAuth2 client attempts to renew a refresh token, the server ensures that
+the token hasn't been revoked.
+
+1. Check authorized clients and update the `LastRefreshed` timestamp. If client
+isn't in list error out and delete the refresh token.
+1. Continue renewing the refresh token.
+
+When the end user revokes a client, the following steps are used to.
+
+1. Update the authorized clients by removing the client from the list. This
+atomic action causes any renew attempts to fail.
+1. Iterate through list of refresh tokens and garbage collect any tokens issued
+by the user for the client. This isn't atomic, but exists so a user can
+re-authorize a client at a later time without authorizing old refresh tokens.
+
+This is clunky due to the lack of multi-object transactions. E.g. we can't delete
+all the refresh tokens at once because we don't have that guarantee.
+
+Merging accounts becomes extremely simple. Just add another remote identity to
+the user object.
+
+We hope to provide a web interface that a user can login to to perform these
+actions. Perhaps using a well known client issued exclusively for the server.
+
+The new `User` object requires adding the following methods to the storage
+interface, and (as a nice side effect) deleting the `ListRefreshTokens()` method.
+
+```go
+type Storage interface {
+	// ...
+
+	CreateUser(u User) error
+
+	DeleteUser(id string) error
+
+	GetUser(id string) error
+	GetUserByRemoteIdentity(connectorID, connectorUserID string) (User, error)
+
+	// Updates are assumed to be atomic.
+	//
+	// When a UpdateUser is called, if clients are removed from the
+	// AuthorizedClients list, the underlying storage SHOULD clean up refresh
+	// tokens issued for the removed clients. This allows backends with
+	// multi-transactional capabilities to utilize them, while key-value stores
+	// only guarantee best effort.
+	UpdateUser(id string, updater func(old User) (User, error)) error
+}
+```
+
+Importantly, this will be the first object which has a secondary index.
+The Kubernetes client will simply list all the users in memory then iterate over
+them to support this (possibly followed by a "watch" based optimization). SQL
+implementations will have an easier time.