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Resource Owner Password Credentials

Warning

The Resource Owner Password Credentials (ROPC) is deprecated and is no longer considered secure for most scenarios. It directly handles usernames and passwords, which could increase the risk of security vulnerabilities. We strongly recommend migrating to Custom Registration flows, which provide enhanced security features and better align with current best practices in identity management. Additionally, it's imperative to restrict the use of the ROPC flow solely to private clients capable of securely holding a secret. Failure to protect this secret renders the token endpoint vulnerable to credential stuffing attacks.

The Resource owner password credentials grant type cannot be chosen when either Authorization code or Device code is configured and vice versa.

Features that require user interaction via the browser are not supported for web clients using the ROPC. So for example consent and additional user authentication (SMS) are not available.

The ROPC feature works with the SAML ECP PAOS binding and allows integration with the TULIP proprietary API using the resource owner password credentials integration. Therefore, a web client using this feature has two possibilities for authentication:

  1. SAML ECP PAOS Binding: The web client should be configured with a SAML identity provider in this case. The configured SAML identity provider requires a single sign-on service with the urn:oasis:names:tc:SAML:2.0:bindings:SOAP binding in its metadata. Attribute mappings of the identity provider will be used to set the user ID and other user properties.

  2. Tulip Proprietary API: The web client can use the Tulip identity provider with the resource owner password credentials integration. This integration allows communication with public Tulip API for authentication using username and password for ROPC flow.

The RFC specifies that the authorization server should protect against brute force attacks. For this protection the OneWelcome Access relies on the used identity provider.

When a scope verification service is configured, requested scopes will be verified. In case of a verification failure a 400 Bad request response with unauthorized_user error is returned. This error response contains a error_uri field containing the scope validation failed uri configured for this scope.

For other error responses please refer to the RFC.