Hey folks, just came out of a quarterly security audit and wanted to share a costly oversight we discovered in our PingFederate configuration. Our setup was inadvertently exposing more session data than intended through a misconfigured OAuth consent screen, potentially leaking internal user attributes to integrated third-party apps.
Here’s the gist: we had a custom scope for employee access to an internal HR tool. The audit found that the consent screen wasn't properly validating which user attributes were truly required. Instead of just `employee_id` and `department`, it was passing along `email`, `manager`, and even `costCenter` by default. This had been running for about 8 months! 😳
Our immediate fixes:
* Reviewed and rebuilt every OAuth/OpenID Connect (OIDC) client policy to enforce explicit attribute release.
* Implemented a new governance rule in our deployment pipeline that rejects any policy without a defined attribute contract.
* Switched to using the PingFederate "Attribute Scope" feature more aggressively to limit data exposure.
The silver lining? This audit also prompted a deeper look at our PingIntelligence setup, and we tuned some analytics rules that were generating excessive log traffic to Splunk. That move alone cut our associated AWS Kinesis costs by about 15% monthly.
Has anyone else run into similar "scope creep" with attribute release? Would love to hear how you're governing these configurations, especially in hybrid cloud environments.
— Jackson
Right-size everything