biscuit/README.md

# Biscuit authentication token

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<img src="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/CleverCloud/biscuit/master/assets/brown.png" width="300">

*logo by [Mathias Adam](http://www.madgraphism.com/)*

Biscuit is a (in development) authentication token for microservices
architectures with the following properties:

- distributed authorization: any node could validate the token only with public
  information;
- offline delegation: a new, valid token can be created from another one by
  attenuating its rights, by its holder, without communicating with anyone;
- capabilities based: authorization in microservices should be tied to rights
  related to the request, instead of relying to an identity that might not make
  sense to the verifier;
- flexible rights managements: the token uses a logic language to specify attenuation
  and add bounds on ambient data;
- small enough to fit anywhere (cookies, etc).

Non goals:
- This is not a new authentication protocol. Biscuit tokens can be used as
  opaque tokens delivered by other systems such as OAuth.
- Revocation: while tokens come with expiration dates, revocation requires
  external state management.

You can follow the next steps on the [roadmap](https://github.com/CleverCloud/biscuit/issues/12).

How to help us?
- provide use cases that we can test the token on (some specific kind of caveats, auth delegation, etc)
- cryptographic design audit: we need to decide on a cryptographic scheme that will be strong enough

Project organisation:
- `DESIGN.md` holds the current ideas about what Biscuit should be
- `SPECIFICATIONS.md` is the in progress description of Biscuit, its format and behaviour
- `experimentations/` holds code examples for the crypographic schemes and caveat language. `code/biscuit-poc/` contains an experimental version of Biscuit, built to explore API issues

## License

Licensed under Apache License, Version 2.0, ([LICENSE-APACHE](LICENSE-APACHE) or http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)

### Contribution

Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally
submitted for inclusion in the work by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0
license, shall be licensed as above, without any additional terms or
conditions.