Chapter 10. OAuth 2.0 Security

OAuth 2.0 is an authorization framework for web applications. It permits selective access to a user's resource without disclosing the password to the website which asks for the resource. This might sound complicated at first but let me explain this: assume that you're on http://www.packt.com (a third party) and want to sign up on their website by providing the generic details, such as first name, last name, email address, and so on, but we already have such information stored in a website, such as Facebook. Through OAuth, http://www.packt.com can ask Facebook to provide them with user information so that the sign-up process can seamlessly proceed without the user having to enter everything manually into the sign-up form. The best part here is that http://www.packt.com gets the user information without actually knowing the Facebook login details of the user. The approval-process interaction is carefully choreographed so that it takes minimal number of steps...