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Hey OAuth authors,

I’m from the UK government and I’m looking at standardising service‑to‑service 
authentication across UK public‑sector, and I’d like to stipulate OAuth bearer 
tokens with DPoP characteristics.
I am hoping insights and answers will help me shape an internal RFC 
(https://github.com/govuk-digital-backbone/request-for-comments/blob/rfc-001-proposal/rfcs/001-jwt-service-to-service-authentication.md).

  1.  Key delivery: My understanding is that DPoP currently requires a jwk in 
the header. Would it be feasible to have an out-of-band public key mechanism? 
Like the private_key_jwt approach – where keys are resolved via the issuer 
(iss) and the header does not explicitly include the jwk?
     *   Resource servers could then authorise based on the issuer’s URL (e.g. 
matching trusted domains like *.gov[.]uk) and fetch public keys directly from a 
DID document or JWK Set URL at a known location.
     *   Would removing the explicit jwk from the header undermine security 
assumptions behind RFC 9449?
  2.  Replay protections: We'd still maintain jti, htu, and htm for replay 
protection and uniqueness. Would omitting jwk from the header compromise these 
protections, or could it be equally secure assuming trusted issuer resolution?
Here’s a simplified illustration of what we'd ideally use as a DPoP proof:
{
  "typ": "dpop+jwt",
  "alg": "ES256"
}
.
{
  "iss": https[:]//example.service[.]gov[.]uk,
  "jti": "12345",
  "htu": https[:]//example[.]com/oauth/token,
  "htm": "POST",
  "iat": 1751892664
}
.SIG

Where the resource server (at example[.]com in this example) retrieves the 
public key from https[:]//example.service[.]gov[.]uk/.well-known/jwks.json or 
similar.

Am I misunderstanding something fundamental about RFC 9449? Is this more of an 
OAuth 2.1 query?
Any guidance or clarification you can offer would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance,
Ollie


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