Communication

Communication

Because the oidc-agent project consists of multiple components and also other applications can interface with oidc-agent, communication between these components is an important part of the project.

Other applications (including oidc-gen, oidc-add, and oidc-token) can communicate with oidc-agent through a UNIX domain socket. This socket can be located through the $OIDC_SOCK environment variable.

The socket is created when oidc-agent starts. The access control on that socket is handled by the file system. The socket is created with user privileges, allowing every application running as the same user as the user that started oidc-agent to communicate with the agent.

A man-in-the-middle attack on this socket would be possible, e.g. using socat. However, it requires an attacker to already have user privileges. Also, sensitive information is encrypted.

oidc-gen and oidc-add encrypt all their communication with the agent (their communication might contain sensitive information like user credentials (only for oidc-gen when using the password flow), OIDC refresh token, client credentials, lock password, etc.) Communication done with liboidc-agent (including oidc-token) is also encrypted. If an application communicates directly through the UNIX domain socket with oidc-agent encryption is theoretically supported. However, it requires usage of libsodium and the implementation details (used functions, parameters, etc.) are not documented and have to be retrieved from the source.

Internally oidc-agent consists of two components that communicate through unnamed pipes. This communication is not encrypted, because it cannot be accessed by other processes.