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 about mobile?


When it comes to which workflow to use for an application on a mobile device, the same considerations are taken into account: can the application securely store and transmit confidential data. This topic gets interesting when we start discussing modern mobile platforms. Most modern mobile platforms provide APIs for secure storage:

  • iOS: iOS 4+ SDK utilizes Data Protection

  • Android: Android 6+ SDK v23+ provides the Android Keystore system

  • Windows Mobile: Windows Phone SDK 8+ provides the DPAPI (Data Protection API)

Tip

This is not an exhaustive list of APIs for secure storage for each platform. Most modern mobile platforms actually provide many different methods for securely storing your data. This is only a sampling.

Used in conjunction with secure transmission protocols, such as SSL or TLS, many application developers consider these satisfactory for the requirements of secure storage and transmission of confidential information, and therefore consider their mobile applications...