Summary

• VirtualMCPServer's incoming Cedar authorizer denied every request when the embedded auth server's upstream provider issues opaque OAuth 2.0 access tokens (Google's ya29.*, GitHub's gho_*). resolveClaims JWT-parsed the upstream token unconditionally and returned the parse error verbatim, so every authorization check failed and the gateway skipped every tool.
• Discriminate by token shape: if the upstream token is not three dot-separated segments it cannot be a JWT (per JOSE compact serialization), so fall back to identity.Claims (the request-token claims). The embedded auth server already mirrors the upstream OIDC sub/email/name into its issued AS token (see pkg/authserver/server/session/session.go), so policies referencing standard OIDC claims continue to evaluate correctly.
• JWT-shaped tokens (three segments) that fail to parse still return the error: a tampered or corrupted upstream JWT must not silently degrade to fallback claims. The added looksLikeJWT(tokenStr) = strings.Count(tokenStr, ".") == 2 discriminator keeps that boundary explicit.
• The auto-binding of PrimaryUpstreamProvider added in Fix Cedar upstream-claim evaluation on VirtualMCPServer #5002 (operator side, cmd/thv-operator/pkg/vmcpconfig/converter.go) doesn't expose an opt-out CRD field, so users with opaque-token providers had no in-config workaround. This change unblocks them without changing operator behavior.

Closes #5146

Type of change

• Bug fix
• New feature
• Refactoring (no behavior change)
• Dependency update
• Documentation
• Other (describe):

Test plan

• Unit tests (go test ./pkg/authz/...)
• go vet ./pkg/authz/...
• gofmt -l pkg/authz/authorizers/cedar/ (clean)
• End-to-end verified on a GKE staging cluster: VirtualMCPServer with accounts.google.com upstream, Cedar policy referencing claim_email. Pre-fix: tools/list returns empty with Authorization check failed for tool, skipping per tool. Post-fix: full aggregated tool list returned, single WARN line upstream token is not a JWT; falling back to request-token claims for Cedar evaluation provider=google.

The existing TestParseUpstreamJWTClaims/opaque_token_returns_error row stays unchanged — the helper still returns the same error; only the caller's recovery behavior changes.

API Compatibility

• This PR does not break the v1beta1 API. No CRD or ConfigOptions schema change.

Changes

Does this introduce a user-facing change?

Yes — bug-fix only. Operators with Google (or any opaque-access-token) upstream OIDC provider now receive the aggregated tools list instead of an empty one. No CRD or configuration change required. A WARN log surfaces each fallback so operators can observe the path their identity claims take.

Tampered or corrupted upstream JWTs still hard-deny — there is no behavior change for JWT-access-token providers (Okta, Azure AD with JWT access tokens, etc.).

Special notes for reviewers

A complementary operator-side change — only auto-set PrimaryUpstreamProvider when the user hasn't asked for the explicit fallback — would expose the documented escape hatch via a CRD field, since the docstring on PrimaryUpstreamProvider already says "When empty, claims from the ToolHive-issued token are used." That route is more invasive (CRD + types + converter + tests). Happy to PR it separately if you'd prefer the opt-in surface over the implicit fallback in this PR. Either approach unblocks the failing case.

The fallback could also be argued to belong behind a ConfigOptions.AllowOpaqueTokenFallback knob (default false). I left it implicit here because (a) the discriminator preserves the deny for tampered JWTs, which is the security-relevant case, and (b) for opaque-token providers the previous behavior was always-deny — there's no operator who relied on it doing anything useful. Open to adding the gate if you'd prefer the more conservative surface.