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

Step 4 – Refresh your access token


The access tokens that you receive in Step 2 - Get your access token often aren't perpetual. Most tokens issued to you will have an expiry time. This may differ depending on the service provider you are integrating with as well as the properties of your client, but this is usually on the order of minutes or hours. Once it expires, it can no longer be used to access protected resources. To continue to access protected resources, you have two options:

  • Start the entire authentication process again. This may require your user to log back in.

  • Attempt to refresh the access token using the accompanying refresh token. This can be done without any user interaction, and so should be used whenever possible.

What if I don't have a refresh token?

As mentioned in the Sometimes a refresh token section earlier, refresh tokens are only returned in the authorization code grant type flow, and only when the service provider supports it. This is because this flow deals with trusted...