51 items tagged “oauth”
2024
Grant Negotiation and Authorization Protocol (GNAP) (via) RFC 9635 was published a few days ago. GNAP is effectively OAuth 3 - it's a newly standardized design for a protocol for delegating authorization so an application can access data on your behalf.
The most interesting difference between GNAP and OAuth 2 is that GNAP no longer requires clients to be registered in advance. With OAuth the client_id and client_secret need to be configured for each application, which means applications need to register with their targets - creating a new application on GitHub or Twitter before implementing the authorization flow, for example.
With GNAP that's no longer necessary. The protocol allows a client to provide a key as part of the first request to the server which is then used in later stages of the interaction.
GNAP has been brewing for a long time. The IETF working group was chartered in 2020, and two of the example implementations (gnap-client-js and oauth-xyz-nodejs) last saw commits more than four years ago.
OAuth from First Principles (via) Rare example of an OAuth explainer that breaks down why each of the steps are designed the way they are, by showing an illustrative example of how an attack against OAuth could work in absence of each measure.
Ever wondered why OAuth returns you an authorization code which you then need to exchange for an access token, rather than returning the access token directly? It's for an added layer of protection against eavesdropping attacks:
If Endframe eavesdrops the authorization code in real-time, they can exchange it for an access token very quickly, before Big Head's browser does. [...] Currently, anyone with the authorization code can exchange it for an access token. We need to ensure that only the person who initiated the request can do the exchange.
Musing about OAuth and LLMs on Mastodon. Lots of people are asking why Anthropic and OpenAI don't support OAuth, so you can bounce users through those providers to get a token that uses their API budget for your app.
My guess: they're worried malicious app developers would use it to trick people and obtain valid API keys.
Imagine a version of my dumb little write a haiku about a photo you take page which used OAuth, harvested API keys and then racked up hundreds of dollar bills against everyone who tried it out running illicit election interference campaigns or whatever.
I'm trying to think of an OAuth API that dishes out tokens which effectively let you spend money on behalf of your users and I can't think of any - OAuth is great for "grant this app access to data that I want to share", but "spend money on my behalf" is a whole other ball game.
I guess there's a version of this that could work: it's OAuth but users get to set a spending limit of e.g. $1 (maybe with the authenticating app suggesting what that limit should be).
Here's a counter-example from Mike Taylor of a category of applications that do use OAuth to authorize spend on behalf of users:
I used to work in advertising and plenty of applications use OAuth to connect your Facebook and Google ads accounts, and they could do things like spend all your budget on disinformation ads, but in practice I haven't heard of a single case. When you create a dev application there are stages of approval so you can only invite a handful of beta users directly until the organization and app gets approved.
In which case maybe the cost for providers here is in review and moderation: if you’re going to run an OAuth API that lets apps spend money on behalf of their users you need to actively monitor your developer community and review and approve their apps.
2023
Oh-Auth—Abusing OAuth to take over millions of accounts (via) Describes an attack against vulnerable implementations of OAuth.
Let’s say your application uses OAuth against Facebook, and then takes the returned Facebook token and gives it access to the user account with the matching email address passed in the token from Facebook.
It’s critical that you also confirm the token was generated for your own application, not something else. Otherwise any secretly malicious app online that uses Facebook login could take on of their stored tokens and use it to hijack an account of your site belonging to that user’s email address.
2022
Weeknotes: datasette-auth0
Datasette 0.61, a Twitter Space and a new Datasette plugin for authenticating against Auth0.
[... 957 words]2019
Get your own Pocket OAuth token (via) I hate it when APIs make you jump through extensive hoops just to get an access token for pulling data directly from your own personal account. I’ve been playing with the Pocket API today and it has a pretty complex OAuth flow, so I built a tiny Flask app on Glitch which helps go through the steps to get an API token for your own personal Pocket account.
datasette-auth-github (via) My first big ASGI plugin for Datasette: datasette-auth-github adds the ability to require users to authenticate against the GitHub OAuth API. You can whitelist specific users, or you can restrict access to members of specific GitHub organizations or teams. While it’s structured as a Datasette plugin it also includes ASGI middleware which can be applied to any ASGI application.
2018
python-twitter/get_access_token.py. Creating an OAuth token for accessing a specific Twitter account is way harder than it needs to be. I was about to write my own command-line script for doing this using PIN-based authentication (where you pop open a browser showing the Twitter login flow, then get a PIN number at the end which you paste back into your script) when I discovered that the python-twitter library already ships with a script to do exactly that. Just run “python get_access_token.py”, paste in your app’s consumer key and secret, follow a link, enter the resulting PIN and the script will spit out the consumer_key / consumer_secret / access_token_key / access_token_secret combo you need to start using the Twitter API.
2010
What are some scalable OAuth and OpenID server implementations?
Any OAuth library should scale horizontally—I can’t see how any one library would be a better choice than another.
[... 36 words]How do you correctly send the oauth_verifier parameter using python-oauth2 and the Twitter API?
This seems relevant: http://groups.google.com/group/t...
[... 87 words]Are there any well-known websites that use Facebook connect or Twitter OAuth as the only sign-in solution without its own sign-in password?
Our site http://lanyrd.com/ only accepts Twitter OAuth logins (at least for the moment).
[... 42 words]RasterWeb: Lanyrd. Pete Prodoehl calls me out on Lanyrd’s integration with the Twitter auth API at the expense of OpenID. I’ve posted a comment with my justification—essentially, tying to Twitter’s ecosystem means I can actually implement the features I’ve been talking about building on top of OpenID for years, with far less engineering effort.
simplegeo’s python-oauth2. The Python OAuth library scene is frighteningly complicated at the moment. This seems to be the most actively maintained, and the readme includes working example code for talking to the Twitter API (including integration with Django auth).
App Engine at Google I/O 2010. OpenID and OAuth are now baked in to the AppEngine users API. They’re also demoing two very exciting new features—a mapper API for doing map/reduce style queries against the data store, and a Channel API for building comet applications.
RFC5785: Defining Well-Known Uniform Resource Identifiers (via) Sounds like a very good idea to me: defining a common prefix of /.well-known/ for well-known URLs (common metadata like robots.txt) and establishing a registry for all such files. OAuth, OpenID and other decentralised identity systems can all benefit from this.
2009
OpenID: Now more powerful and easier to use! The OpenID+OAuth hybrid protocol (where a user can sign in with OpenID and grant an application access to their OAuth protected resources such as a contact list at the same time) is now supported by Google, Yahoo! and MySpace—this feels like OpenID finally coming of age.
Exploring OAuth-Protected APIs. One of the downsides of OAuth is that it makes debugging APIs in your browser much harder. Seth Fitzsimmons’ oauth-proxy solves this by running a Twisted-powered proxy on your local machine which OAuth-signs every request going through it using your consumer key, secret and tokens for that API. Using it with a browsers risks exposing your key and token (but not secret) to sites you accidentally browse to—it would be useful if you could pass a whitelist of API domains as a command line option to the proxy.
Why an OAuth iframe is a Great Idea. Because users should a) learn to be phished and b) not even be given the option to avoid being phished if they know what they’re doing? No, no and thrice no. If you want to improve the experience, use a popup window so the user can still see the site they are signing in to in the background.
Teaching users to be secure is a shared responsibility
Ryan Janssen: Why an OAuth iframe is a Great Idea.
[... 570 words]oauth-signpost. The Qype API uses OAuth to sign client requests with the developer’s API key, so it’s not surprising to see them release a Java OAuth signing library compatible with Google’s Android mobile platform.
django-piston. Promising looking Django mini-framework for creating RESTful APIs, from the bitbucket team. Ticks all of Jacob’s boxes, even including built-in pluggable authentication support with HTTP Basic, Digest and OAuth out of the box.
Sign in with Twitter. Intriguing: Twitter are now an OpenID-style identity provider... using OAuth.
As more details become available, it seems what happened is that a Twitter administrator (i.e., employee) gave their password to a 3rd party site because their API requires it, which was then used to compromise Twitter's admin interface.
The username/password key's major disadvantage is that it open all the doors to the house. The OAuth key only opens a couple doors; the scope of the credentials is limited. That's a benefit, to be sure, but in Twitter's case, a malicious application that registered for OAuth with both read and write privileges can do most evil things a user might be worried about.
Antipatterns for sale. Twply collected over 800 Twitter usernames and passwords (OAuth can’t arrive soon enough) and was promptly auctioned off on SitePoint to the highest bidder.
2008
Now You Can Sign Into Friend Connect Sites With Your Twitter ID. Great. Now even Google is asking me for my Twitter password. Slow clap. How’s that Twitter OAuth beta coming along?
Skillswap goes Portable. Skillswap Brighton will be addressing OAuth and Data Portability on Wednesday. I’m annoyed to be missing it.
OAuth in Minneapolis. OAuth looks like it’s on track for an IETF Working Group.
Best Practices for OAuth with Fire Eagle. “We insist that you must NOT use embedded rendering controls to present the OAuth process with Yahoo! and Fire Eagle”—that’s a clear nod towards the iPhone development community.
[REDACTED]. Now that the iPhone NDA has been lifted be prepared for a flood of useful tips about the platform. Here’s Craig Hockenberry explaining how iPhone URL schemes work (used to great effect in the Pownce app for returning to the right place post-OAuth authentication in Safari).