Jabber Ticket Authentication is a method of authenticating with HTTP servers using your jabber identification.
This allows you to login to websites using your jabber address in a single sign-on fashion similar to .NET Passport, but unlike .NET Passport is not locked into a single authentication provider.
Tickets also mean the jabber ticket provider and the web server do not need to be tightly integrated for authentication to work, also because it's not tightly integrated it means webmasters do not need to setup their own jabber server to provide tickets, they can use a third party provider even a central "tickets.jabber.org". Also because tickets are not tightly integrated it makes it far easier for webmasters to integrate with Jabber, it also makes web farms far more scalable and reliable.
The motivations for this document are:
The realm is the JID you need to request your JabberTicket from.
The ticket is encrypted data represented as a string, the client does not need to decode it since it is passed to the webserver unaltered.
The following guidelines may assist developers.
This form of HTTP authentication is susceptable to man in the middle attack where the ticket could be captured and retransmitted by someone else, but this can be solved by using an encrypted jabber connection (e.g. HTTPS) and an HTTPS connection to the webserver.
It is recommended the encryption key length for the ticket be long enough to make it hard to crack the ticket.
It is recommended the ticket has an expiration and that it be between a few minutes and a few hours, e.g. 60 minutes.
The HTTP authentication scheme "JabberTicket" may need to be registered with IANA.
The XMPP Registrar [1] will need to register the new namespace of "http://jabber.org/protocol/ticket".
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