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

Summary


We accomplished a lot in this chapter. We explored the authorization code grant flow, noting differences with the implicit grant flow, which we demonstrated in the previous chapter. During this detailed exploration of the protocol, we discussed the traits of the flow that make it more secure and the preferred authorization flow for OAuth 2.0 clients. We also saw how some service providers may not necessarily abide by the final version of the OAuth 2.0 specification. To remedy this, we explored some alternative methods for gaining authorization and fetching tokens that were supported in previous versions of the specification. It all culminated when we created a simple Java application to request an access token from Facebook for our sample application, The World's Most Interesting Infographic Generator. Next, we will be looking at how to use this newly obtained access token to request access to our user's profile and feed data.