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 are the differences?


The main differences between the server-side workflow and the client-side workflow can be summarized in this table:

 

Simplicity

Security

Access duration

Server-side flow

(authorization code grant flow)

More complex: In order to facilitate the secure storage and transmission of confidential data, a backend server and data store must be maintained.

More secure: The server-side flow never exposes the key to the browser, and so has a significantly smaller chance of being leaked.

Long-term: Because an application using the authorization code grant flow is trusted to store confidential information, it can store properties needed for long-term, even offline, access.

Client-side flow

(implicit grant flow)

Less complex: Due to the more relaxed requirements around security for untrusted applications, no backend server or data store is required. Everything can happen from the browser.

Less secure: The key is passed directly to the browser and so has a much larger...