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 8. Refresh Your Access Token

In the previous three chapters, we worked on the full end-to-end process of fetching an access token and using it to make an API call. We demonstrated this in a variety of ways, using the two most common methods for requesting an access token, as well as using the three methods for passing an access token in a protected resource access request. This works great for a single API call. However, what happens when you want to make multiple API calls over a longer period of time? Or, more specifically, how do we deal with expired access tokens? This is what we will be exploring next.

In this chapter, we will look at the optional workflow for refreshing your access token using what's called a refresh token. This workflow is described by the OAuth 2.0 specification, but is optional for service providers to support. So, in addition to looking at how to refresh your access token using a refresh token, we will also look at the alternative for refreshing your access...