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

OpenID Connect


The OAuth 2.0 Authorization Framework describes a protocol for managing authorization to protected resources for your service. It does not, however, describe methods for authentication. OpenID Connect is a protocol built on top of the OAuth 2.0 protocol in order to provide a complete solution for both authentication and authorization. In short, OpenID Connect provides an identity layer on top of the authorization protocol described by OAuth 2.0. This allows client applications to verify the identity of an end-user based on the authentication performed while gaining user consent. Most importantly, this can all be done by the client application without having to store or manage passwords.

You may recall from Chapter 1, Why Should I Care About OAuth 2.0? that we introduced the concepts of federated identity and delegated authority and mentioned that they are actually the same underlying concept. In one delegated authority scenario, the user is delegating authority for a client...