[arnarbi]

> None of these changes are necessarily authenticated - I don't know that it specifically was the user agent that shared the token with the service or added the read-only restriction, at least with the core tech.

Macaroons are very much grounded in capability thinking, where it is a “feature” that principals such as the user agent in your case don’t need to have representable identities. So there’s nobody to authenticate, except the fact that it was a holder of the previous macaroons tag, which means they had the authority it represented.

In other words, not needing something like a PKI is somewhat the point of it all.

If you have the need to authenticate the intermediate principals, eg because they have pre-existing identities already, then the capability model in general may just be a distraction. They could just sign their desired attentuations with their own identity key.

[dwaite]

One use of macaroons is to have caveats restricting the request itself used to achieve higher security than bearer tokens. This might be "only good for this service" audience restrictions or "only good for this hashed request message" as proof-of-possession.

This creates a role division, where the user agent caveats before the proof-of-possession are potentially authorized differently than the ones after. It also creates the possibility that you will need to override caveats per policy, say when that message wasn't a terminal call but rather hitting an ingress to a complex internal services framework which would still like to leverage the macaroon.

Basically - if a role has a requirement that they always terminate with a particular caveat, you know a section of caveats was created by software in that role. This is more of a second level of authorization than it is authentication though, I would agree.

[arnarbi]

In one of our iterations, we did indeed have a mandatory rule that each set of caveats added by a holder was terminated by a “sign off” caveat. But in the end we concluded that if that mattered in the actual enforcement, then one wasn’t really doing things “the capability way” and then that principal probably needed some stronger authentication than merely having held the unattenuated macaroon.

But that’s theoretical thinking and the real world is indeed more shades of gray.

See you in Madrid!