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

Troubleshooting


As we've discovered throughout the book, the OAuth 2.0 protocol is simply a series of structured HTTP requests and responses to facilitate the transfer of data. Because of the straightforward nature of the protocol, we are able to troubleshoot issues with basic tools. In fact, we can simulate the majority of our implemented OAuth 2.0 flows with these tools alone, separate from our application. Here is the approach we will take:

  • If it's a POST request, we can simulate it with a cURL command

  • If it's a GET request, we can simulate it directly within our browser, or with a cURL command

With this approach in mind, we can now look at the various flows that we've examined in the book, this time, simulating them with our tools instead of within our application. Let's begin!

The implicit grant flow

The purpose of the implicit grant flow is to gain authorization from the user in the form of an access token from the service provider. It begins with the authorization request.

The authorization...