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

What's at stake?


Just as with any application, security should be a top priority. This is especially true for applications that utilize the OAuth 2.0 protocol. In order to understand why this is true, let's remember what OAuth 2.0 actually does for us. Recall that, in the first chapter, we discussed how OAuth 2.0 provides us with federated identity as well as delegated authority. If we aren't diligent with our security practices during implementation, we can expose some very dangerous holes for attackers to exploit. And, when dealing with federated identity and delegated authority, we must be extra vigilant since these are very powerful practices that can provide attackers with a lot of power.

If an attacker were somehow able to exploit your application to game either of these concepts, they may be able to do the following:

  • Impersonate users

  • Impersonate client applications

  • Grant themselves otherwise unauthorized permissions

  • Gain access to protected data and resources

In order to combat this, we...