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

Let's get started


Up to this point, we have been talking about what OAuth 2.0 is, how it works, and how it is used around us. Now, we will finally be able to look at the process of becoming, and creating, an OAuth 2.0 client. It's really quite simple. The process of building our first OAuth 2.0 client can be broken down into these four easy steps:

  1. Register your client application.

  2. Get your access token.

  3. Use your access token to access a protected resource.

  4. If applicable, refresh your access token.

Tip

The ability to refresh your access token is only available for trusted clients. In order for a client application to refresh its access token, it must be able to securely store what is called a refresh token. This capability is only available to trusted clients, and therefore, the ability to refresh access tokens is restricted to trusted clients.

You may be wondering how untrusted clients renew their access. We will explain this in the Step 4 – Refresh your access token section later on in this chapter...