The OpenID Connect Provider from BankID is a platform supporting multiple Identity Provider (IDP) options, among them BankID and xID.

The platform provides ID Tokens for authenticated users and Access Tokens to authorize access to various Supplementary Services on behalf on the user.

The OIDC Provider is currently in pilot for evaluation purposes and shall not be used for commercial applications.

The platform may be augmented with more IDP options and Supplementary Service options in the future.

Please contact developer@bankidnorge.no to request access to the OpenID Connect Provider in any of its configurations. See availability and access for further information.

 

Characteristics of BankID OIDC access_tokens

Resources managed/authorized by the BankID OIDC Service get a “public” access_token (“one access_token to rule them all”). When an OIDC Client uses scope (or default scope) to define what resources it needs authorization for, the issued access_token can be used for all those resources. The resources must call the introspect endpoint in order to verify that it is the correct audience/resource for this access_token as well as getting returned the access_token contents/claims. Resources are expected to cache/cookie this information so there’s no need to call introspect for every incoming request with the same access_token.

The introspect endpoint demands basic authentication with the resource’s client_id and client_secret so that it knows what resource it is dealing with. 

Another policy is to have “private” access_tokens. That means each resource has their own access_token issued and encrypted with their client_secret/resource_secret. This would remove the need to call introspect in order to validate and get claims, but it will be difficult for the client to keep track of all the access_tokens issued to individual resource services. AAD is doing this and using the refresh_token to ask for more scope (new resources). This would work as long as the refresh_token is issued for the same resource owner (end-user).

"Private access_tokens" are currently not supported. Refresh_tokens are also not implemented. The rationale is that the supported “public” implementation is considered to more efficient (provided the caching we mentioned).