Issuer URL in OpenID Connect Discovery should be a working URL?

Question

After going through the OpenID Connect Discovery Spec https://openid.net/specs/openid-connect-discovery-1_0.html#ProviderConfig, I understand that Issuer is a URL which is used to validate the discovery URL (issuer + "/.well-known/openid-configuration").

I want to know if this issuer URL should be a working URL pointing some resource/service or can be a just valid URL but do not point to any resource. Does this hold significance in any other OpenID Connect flows?

Answer 1

The issuer value itself does not need to resolve to any resource or anything online. Only if you want to conform to the Discovery spec then <issuer>/.well-known/openid-configuration should resolve to the Discovery metadata document that describes the Provider.