Subject: Re: [OAUTH-WG] Last Call: <draft-ietf-oauth-v2-bearer-15.txt> (The OAuth 2.0 Authorization Protocol: Bearer Tokens) to Proposed Standard

From: John Bradley <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 6 Feb 2012 22:07:04 -0300

RE new text in Draft 23

http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-oauth-v2-23#section-10.10

Generated tokens and other credentials not intended for handling by
   end-users MUST be constructed from a cryptographically strong random
   or pseudo-random number sequence ([RFC1750]) generated by the
   authorization server.

Given that many implementations may elect to use signed tokens, such as SAML or JWT (JOSE) this should not be a MUST.

Giving people sensible defaults such as the probability of an attacker guessing a valid access token for the protected resource should be less than 2^(-128).

The probability of generating hash colisions randomly is a odd metric,  2^(-128) for a SHA256 as I recall.  
Many factors play into what is secure, token lifetime etc.  

I don't mind some reasonable defaults but adding a requirement for unstructured tokens is a bit much.

Regards
John B.