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

First look at the client-side flow


Let's, once again, go back to our example of GoodApp wanting to suggest contacts to you by looking at your Facebook friends. Imagine that the GoodApp client application is actually a simple web application hosted in the browser. This is an example of an untrusted client due to its inability to securely store information. The implicit grant type is best suited for this type of client application. Let's look at how the exchange of information (step 4 in the workflow image mentioned in the User consent section) is achieved using the implicit grant type.

An untrusted client – GoodApp requests access for user's Facebook friends using implicit grant

Since GoodApp, in this case, is an untrusted client, they cannot be trusted to store or relay any confidential information. Specifically, they cannot store any client credentials or tokens. Because of this, they have a very simple workflow. Here is what the exchange looks like, picking up after GoodApp directs you to...