Book Image

Mastering OAuth 2.0

Book Image

Mastering OAuth 2.0

Overview of this book

OAuth 2.0 is a powerful authentication and authorization framework that has been adopted as a standard in the technical community. Proper use of this protocol will enable your application to interact with the world's most popular service providers, allowing you to leverage their world-class technologies in your own application. Want to log your user in to your application with their Facebook account? Want to display an interactive Google Map in your application? How about posting an update to your user's LinkedIn feed? This is all achievable through the power of OAuth. With a focus on practicality and security, this book takes a detailed and hands-on approach to explaining the protocol, highlighting important pieces of information along the way. At the beginning, you will learn what OAuth is, how it works at a high level, and the steps involved in creating an application. After obtaining an overview of OAuth, you will move on to the second part of the book where you will learn the need for and importance of registering your application and types of supported workflows. You will discover more about the access token, how you can use it with your application, and how to refresh it after expiration. By the end of the book, you will know how to make your application architecture robust. You will explore the security considerations and effective methods to debug your applications using appropriate tools. You will also have a look at special considerations to integrate with OAuth service providers via native mobile applications. In addition, you will also come across support resources for OAuth and credentials grant.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Mastering OAuth 2.0
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
11
Tooling and Troubleshooting
Index

What is a mobile application?


The term "mobile application" is used quite loosely these days. Typically, when someone says "mobile application" they are referring to one of two types of applications:

  • Mobile-optimized web application

  • Natively installed mobile application

The first type is simply a web application that runs in the browser, but is optimized for the smaller screens typical in mobile devices like phones and tablets. This type of application is no different from any other web application. It executes in the browser, and so the same rules and considerations apply to it regardless of whether it is a mobile browser or a desktop browser.

The second, however, is of more importance to us. This type of application represents natively installed applications on mobile devices, an entirely new platform in recent years. From here on, when we mention "mobile applications", we are referring to this second category of applications, natively installed mobile applications, and not mobile-optimized...