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!


We have all the theory now. We know how to make the authorization request and the subsequent access token request, and we know the two types of responses we can get (success or error) for each one. Let's build it in our sample application!

Build the base application

To demonstrate the authorization code grant flow, we will be building a basic Java application. It will contain a simple HTML/JS frontend powered by a Java backend, which we will use to make our requests and process the responses. As we did in the previous chapter, we will also be using Apache Maven to facilitate the creation and running of this sample application. Many of these beginning steps for setting up the application are very similar to the steps we followed in the previous chapter. Some are even identical. After we have built the base application, though, the steps become quite different.

Install Apache Maven

If you haven't already installed Apache Maven for the sample application in the previous chapter...