1.2. Terminology

Per OAuth2 terminology, a resource server is the server hosting the protected resources and capable of accepting and responding to protected resource requests.

Resource servers usually rely on some kind of information to decide whether access to a protected resource should be granted. For RESTful-based resource servers, that information is usually carried in a security token, typically sent as a bearer token along with every request to the server. Web applications that rely on a session to authenticate users usually store that information in the user’s session and retrieve it from there for each request.

In Red Hat Single Sign-On, any confidential client application can act as a resource server. This client’s resources and their respective scopes are protected and governed by a set of authorization policies.