Question

Section 4.2 of the draft OAuth 2.0 protocol indicates that an authorization server can return both an access_token (which is used to authenticate oneself with a resource) as well as a refresh_token, which is used purely to create a new access_token:

https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6749#section-4.2

Why have both? Why not just make the access_token last as long as the refresh_token and not have a refresh_token?

Answer 1

The idea of refresh tokens is that if an access token is compromised, because it is short-lived, the attacker has a limited window in which to abuse it.

Refresh tokens, if compromised, are useless because the attacker requires the client id and secret in addition to the refresh token in order to gain an access token.

Having said that, because every call to both the authorization server and the resource server is done over SSL – including the original client id and secret when they request the access/refresh tokens – I am unsure as to how the access token is any more “compromisable” than the long-lived refresh token and clientid/secret combination.

This of course is different to implementations where you don’t control both the authorization and resource servers.

Here is a good thread talking about uses of refresh tokens: OAuth Archives.

A quote from the above, talking about the security purposes of the refresh token:

Refresh tokens… mitigates the risk of a long-lived access_token leaking (query param in a log file on an insecure resource server, beta or poorly coded resource server app, JS SDK client on a non https site that puts the access_token in a cookie, etc)