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

Tools


Before we dive into troubleshooting, it would be beneficial to explore the tools we will be using. Fortunately for us, the toolset required for effectively troubleshooting an OAuth 2.0 workflow is quite simple and widely available. We will primarily be using two tools to troubleshoot our flows. They are:

  • A modern web browser, such as Chrome, Firefox, or Edge

  • cURL, the command-line utility

That's it! With these two tools in your arsenal, you are equipped to effectively troubleshoot any OAuth 2.0 workflow.

Tip

What is cURL?

cURL (pronounced as it is spelled, "curl") is a command-line utility for transferring data and making HTTP requests. It is provided natively in most Linux/Unix-based operating systems, including Mac OS X. There is support for it on Windows, but must be installed manually.

It is a great utility for testing OAuth 2.0 workflows as you can use it to simulate many of the requests that your application will make, but you can do so via simple command-line commands rather than...