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

Chapter 6. Get an Access Token with the Server-Side Flow

In the previous chapter, we looked at how to obtain an access token using the client-side flow (that is, the implicit grant flow). We demonstrated this by creating a very simple HTML/JavaScript application that requested an access token from Facebook using the credentials we created in Chapter 4, Register Your Application.

In this chapter, we will take a closer look at the server-side flow for getting an access token. Just as we did for the client-side flow in the previous chapter, we will look at the request and response structure necessary to make successful calls to an OAuth 2.0 service provider. We will then create a simple Java application, and use our knowledge to request an access token from the server side using the slightly more complex, but more secure, server-side flow (that is, authorization code grant flow).