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 flow should we use for mobile applications?


Just as developing any other type of client application, the type of flow to use should be decided based on the capabilities of the platform. However, mobile platforms are quite new and rich, and so added attention is required when making this decision. The two main flows are still available to us—implicit grant and authorization code grant. Recall that the implicit grant is designed for use in untrusted clients, while the authorization code grant is designed for use with trusted clients. Further recall that trusted clients are clients that are able to securely store and transmit their confidential properties. So, the question then becomes, are mobile applications considered trusted, or untrusted?

Are mobile applications trusted or untrusted?

In order for a mobile application to be considered trusted, it must be able to securely store and transmit confidential information. This can really only be achieved in one way, with the use of a backend...