What is a claim in OAuth?

Claims are pieces of information about a user that have been packaged, signed into security tokens and sent by an issuer or identity provider to relying party applications through a security token service (STS) .

JSON web tokens (JWTs) claims are pieces of information asserted about a subject . For example, an ID token (which is always a JWT) can contain a claim called name that asserts that the name of the user authenticating is “John Doe”.

OpenID Connect (OIDC) scopes are used by an application during authentication to authorize access to a user’s details, like name and picture. Each scope returns a set of user attributes , which are called claims. The scopes an application should request depend on which user attributes the application needs.

Claims are name/value pairs that contain information about a user . So an example of a good scope would be “read_only”.