Okta Cross App Access (XAA) and ID-JAG, Explained for SaaS

Okta’s Cross App Access (XAA) uses the draft Identity Assertion JWT Authorization Grant (ID-JAG) protocol to let an enterprise identity provider centrally control application-to-application and AI-agent access on behalf of users, replacing unmanaged individual OAuth consent and long-lived refresh tokens. In the flow, a requesting app exchanges a user identity assertion with the customer’s IdP for a short-lived ID-JAG, then presents that signed JWT to the resource application’s authorization server, which validates it and issues its own short-lived access token without a refresh token. Resource applications must establish per-customer trust records and validate the token’s issuer, signature, type, audience, client ID, expiration, subject, scopes, and unique ID to prevent cross-tenant access and replay attacks, while resolving users through stable identifiers rather than email addresses. SAML-based applications can participate using issuer and NameID-based identity mapping, and the same approach underpins MCP’s Enterprise-Managed Authorization extension. Although Okta and more than 25 early adopters support the pattern, ID-JAG remains an active IETF draft and conventional OAuth consent remains necessary for customers whose identity providers do not support it.

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