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

Let's build it!


Now that we know more about access tokens, and the various ways to pass them along to the service provider during an API call, let's incorporate this into our application! Currently, we have two versions of our sample application: the client-side example and the server-side example. We will make API calls in both versions of the application, and we will look at utilizing all three methods of passing the access token. Let's begin!

Note

The Facebook Graph API

For our sample application, we will be making API calls to Facebook's Graph API. This is the API that Facebook offers developers who want to integrate with their services. Protected and accessed using OAuth 2.0, this makes for an ideal setting to demonstrate our usage of the protocol. Find more information on the Facebook Graph API at https://developers.facebook.com/docs.

In our client-side application

In Chapter 5, Get an Access Token with the Client-Side Flow, we built an HTML/JS webpage capable of requesting an access...