draft-mcguinness-oauth-actor-profile
OAuth Actor Profile for Delegation
OAuth deployments increasingly involve agents and workloads acting on
behalf of human users across organizational boundaries. Existing
specifications provide relevant building blocks (notably the act
claim from RFC 8693 Token Exchange) but do not define a consistent
profile for representing delegated actor relationships across JWT
assertion grants (RFC 7523), JWT access tokens (RFC 9068), and
Transaction Tokens, nor for classifying actor entity types or
signaling support between authorization servers and resource servers.
The result is inconsistent actor representation and actor-
representation interoperability gaps that force deployments to rely
on proprietary conventions.
This document defines the OAuth Actor Profile for Delegation. It
specifies a common act claim structure extended with sub_profile for
entity-type classification, processing rules for authorization
servers and resource servers across the three token families and
their Token Exchange inputs, and OAuth discovery metadata parameters
for advertising actor-profile support. The profile applies uniformly
across token types and integrates with existing sender-constraint
mechanisms (DPoP, mTLS). It does not standardize the policies by
which systems determine whether a given actor is permitted to act for
a subject; those decisions remain deployment-specific.