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

The ideal workflow


When designing your application, you will want to utilize all of the tools and workflows at your disposal to achieve a user experience that is as seamless as possible. Now, given all of the information we have presented in this book thus far, we can create an optimal behavior workflow that our application can follow that makes the best use of the available workflows to minimize any user interactions that the user will have to do before your application can make API calls:

In the preceding flow diagram, we start with an access token. We continue to make API calls while the token is valid. Once the token becomes invalid (either because the API calls return with an invalid_token error, or we calculated the time of expiry in anticipation of its invalidation), we must fetch a new access token. If we have a refresh token, we can use that. If that refresh request fails because the refresh token has itself expired, or if we don't have a refresh token at all, then we must resort...