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 3 – Use your access token


Once you have your access token, the hard part is done. You are now ready to start making API calls! The APIs themselves will differ depending on the service, but the ways you pass your access token will remain the same. Just as there are various ways to obtain an access token (authorization code grant, implicit grant, and so on), there are multiple ways to pass your access token with an API call. They are via:

  • Authorization request header field

  • Form-encoded body parameter

  • URI query parameter

The details of these different methods aren't important at this point. We will discuss them in more detail in Chapter 7, Use Your Access Token, when we actually use these methods to invoke API calls with Facebook for our sample application.

Referring back to our GoodApp example, we now have an access token and are now able to make a request to Facebook for the user's Facebook friends. To do this, we would make a call to the Facebook Graph API to get their list of friends who...