Posted by niyikiza 21 hours ago
Enterprise-Managed OAuth, or Cross App Access (XAA), brings this IT-Admin centrally controlled sharing model into the OAuth framework so it works with the existing ecosystem.
There's also a great UX benefit from moving data sharing consent management from employees to IT Admins - it means that employees don't need to sit through a bunch of OAuth flows to link their accounts together. Their IT Admin has already set up all the sharing controls. Everything plugs in together and should Just Work from day one. Think joining a new company on the first day and your Slack is already linked to your Zoom, your Drive, your Calendar, etc...
Sure, if I’m a business, I will make a business decision to share, or not share, some resource with ChatGPT. But, if I do decide to share something with ChatGPT, I absolutely do NOT want it shared with every single ChatGPT thread, more or less how I don’t want it shared with every single tab an employee has open in a browser.
The article is all about reducing friction. Suppose I start a conversation and enter some highly third-party-prompt-injectable request, perhaps "Fork github.com/some_third_party/coolproject and submit a PR to do such-and-such." That repo injects a prompt that attempts to do a tool call to steal all my money. If I indeed have a bank MCP configured, I absolutely want to be prompted!
Now I realize it's silly for the prompt to look like "Would you like to grant [OpenAI/Anthropic/whatever] access to such-and-such account with such-and-such OAuth resources?", but having some kind of explicit opt-in, per conversation, to MCP access seems really quite important. But the article all about reducing friction and avoiding prompts.
So maybe LLM providers will do a good job, but I'm not holding my breath.
Ensuring that an LLM doesn't have free reign over calling any MCP tool at any point in time is one of the main jobs of a client (apart from the general data persistence, etc.), and one that's very dependent on the setup (e.g. many MCP servers expose public data where tool calling is mostly not that sensitive) and the acceptable risk profile.
This MCP extension also doesn't significantly change anything about tool calling control from the perspective of the client. MCP servers were previously also authenticated once per user, and not once per conversation or once per tool call.
(a) A major problem where one agent can give dangerous instructions to another.
(b) A desire for an “agent” to cleanly delegate permissions to another “agent”. I am extremely unclear as to what an “agent” is in this context. Is one’s OpenAI or Anthropic account an “agent”? How is (b) related to (a)?
(c) An observation that existing OAuth + JWT can’t really do (b) and that a new spec could allow delegation.
ISTM:
- (a)’s root cause is a complete lack of control on the portions of a repository that are interpreted by various tools in a trusted/privileged manner.
- (b) could be addressed by a capability or proxy system.
- Most services that offer OAuth or other types of API keys have absurdly coarse-grained permissions. GitHub’s OAuth cannot obviously even restrict to a particular organization, let alone a repository, and good luck blocking commits to .github. Cloudflare can’t restrict DNS operations to a particular host. A shocking number of major services have no concept of non-human accounts. The list goes on. Delegation is of dubious value in this setting.
- Why would one ever want to give a bearer token to an “agent”?
- Wouldn’t a proxy serve this purpose more flexibly and more universally?
The idea in my draft is to do the attenuation and verification before the call reaches the service, enforced at the boundary, like the proxy setup you're describing. And the token wouldn't be a bearer token per se; there's proof of possession, and the constraints narrow at each hop and travel with the token, so the boundary can verify the chain itself rather than rely on a central authority. The design is inspired by macaroons and other capability-based access control work.
Full draft's here if you want to pick it apart: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-niyikiza-oauth-attenu...
Other way to look it is that as an employee you will not be able to connect to any MCP server anymore unless its configured in your IDP.
I read the initial paragraph from the page and I had similar reaction with an additional touch of:
'There is a purpose for that friction.'
That's also blind spot in normal OAuth and I was surprised to find that this was never addressed in all the years that non-MCP OAuth found adoption.
Removing that from the employee also removes the employee from responsibility for any breach of information IMO, and companies definitely don't want that lol. What they do want is users to stop complaining about the annoying reauth every 8-12 hours for a dozen services which this does.
The kinds of wishlists I hear are more about users managing fine-grain service permissions for various agentic roles and managing which agents have access to which role, which leans the other direction. They want to allow users are to treat agents like cloud services and have a greater responsibility for applying least privilege, justify leak risks, etc. The onus to protect this data will always be an employee responsibility in the end.
What this gives your employer is the allow list of AI agents that you can use (the ones that can use your employer's IDP to access downstream MCP servers) and filters out all the MCP servers that do not implement this protocol. Essentially the threshold to use any AI agent or any MCP server would be a lot higher.
I like one of the author's characterizations[0].
> Now employees no longer have to connect MCP servers manually and wait for a series of OAuth and login prompts. Once you log in to Claude from Okta, all the preconfigured MCP servers are already connected! It's not every day you get to improve both usability and security!
So instead, you can run centralized infra to validate a user, device, what scopes their requesting and duration, and enforce policies for all your apps?
Can we get this in other OAuth 2.0 clients?
RFC draft: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-oauth-identity-a...
You can tell with this Anthropic consulted with experts first on the design and implementation of this rather than vibe coding the spec in isolation. Unless the user themselves is compromised and connects via the Enterprise-Managed Authorization, at least you can remotely revoke permissions / access to reduce that risk.
We'll see, but give credit where credit is due.