Biscuit authentication token

logo by Mathias Adam

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.