February 2012
Beginner to intermediate
78 pages
2h 13m
English
Content preview from Getting Started with OAuth 2.0Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Why Don’t These APIs Just Use Passwords for Authorization?
Usernames and passwords are typically the lowest common denominator for authentication and authorization on the Web. They are used for HTTP Basic and HTTP Digest authentication and on countless login pages. However, asking a user for their password has a number of side effects:
- Trust
A user may not trust providing their password to your application.
- Decreased user sensitivity to phishing
Even if the user is comfortable providing their password to your application, making the user comfortable doing this around the Web can have negative long-term effects, such as making phishing scams more effective.
- Expanded access and risk
When the user provides their password to your application, you get access to not only the data your application needs, but all other data in the user’s account. The application has an obligation to its users to securely store these passwords and prevent them from leaking. Many developers do not want the risk exposure of having this additional responsibility.
- Limited reliability
When a user changes their password, your application no longer has access to their data.
- Revocation challenges
The only way a user can revoke access to your application is by changing their password, which also revokes access to all other apps.
- Passwords become required
When an API provider supports federated authentication mechanisms such as OpenID or SAML (see Federated Authentication), users may not have passwords on their accounts. This ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.