I want to integrate the foursquare API in my website but I'm not that familiar with API security so I want to make sure I'm doing it right.
I want to search for venues in an area like the documentation states:
https://api.foursquare.com/v2/venues/search
?client_id=CLIENT_ID
&client_secret=CLIENT_SECRET
&v=20130815
&ll=40.7,-74
&query=sushi
Using javascript however, I don't feel comfortable that the client secret is exposed in my code like this, because if someone looks at my source they have the client_id and client_secret which makes it possible to authenticate themselves with my code:
https://developer.foursquare.com/overview/auth
Isn't that the same as, "hey look at my source code, my username = "someusername" and my password is "somepassword"?
Shouldn't the "client_secret" remain secret like it says? Or am I looking at it the wrong way?
I think the issue is that you're trying to access the Foursquare API using Javascript, which is executed on the client side, so yes, anybody using your website can, with a little bit of investigation, see the secret key that you're using, which is something that you definitely don't want to do.
The way to get around that is not to access the API using code that is executed on the client side. Whatever language you have building the website on the server side should be the code that accesses the API (using the auth credentials that you have set up) and then returns the results of the API call to the rest of the code.
Alternately, you can get users to authenticate with Foursquare and get an access token, which you can then use in user-specific API calls, and it won't matter if those are executed on the client side. I think this is the relevant page in the documentation for using that method: https://developer.foursquare.com/overview/auth#access
Related
I have managed to get an access token from the twitter api. Now I want to use that token for my further data fetching things, so please help me here to get the details of my twitter account.
For example, lets say I wanted to get the user's data, so when I tested this in apigee console, I got my result.
But how to get the same result, using same api, by hitting on a browser using the access token
something like this
Please help
It's a little more complex than the URL you suggested, but you can use Twitter's OAuth tool to generate the OAuth signature you need to make requests to its Home Timeline API call.
You can find the OAuth tool here:
https://dev.twitter.com/docs/api/1.1/get/statuses/home_timeline#oauth-tool
it's not like that when making twitter api calls you need to send consumer key, consumer secret, your_access_token and your_access_token_secret together
Eg: oauth_consumer_key="KEY",oauth_signature_method="HMAC-SHA1",oauth_timestamp="TIMESTAMP",oauth_nonce="NONCE",oauth_version="1.0",oauth_token="YOUR_TOKEN",oauth_signature="SIGN"
Source: https://twittercommunity.com/t/getting-the-user-details-using-access-token/6325/3
I would like to programmatically query the Flickr API using my own credentials only just to grab some data from there on a frequent basis. It appears that the Flickr API is favouring OAuth now.
My question is: how should I authenticate the API without user intervention just for myself? Is it possible any more?
Once you have received an oauth_token (Access Token), you can use it for multiple subsequent API calls. You should be able to persist the token in a data store (I haven't done this myself) and use it even after your application restarts. Of course, you still need to write the code to get the Access Token the first time.
If your application is already coded using the old authentication API, it looks like there is a one-time call that you can make to get a new-style Access Token. See http://www.flickr.com/services/api/auth.oauth.html#transition
Even if you don't have a coded application, you might be able to use the API Explorer for any of the calls that requires authentication (flickr.activity.userComments, for example) to harvest an api_sig and auth_token.
The scenario which you are describing is sometimes referred to as 2-legged OAuth. (https://developers.google.com/identity/protocols/OAuth2ServiceAccount)
Google APIs support this via a 'service account'.
Unfortunately Flickr doesn't seem to support this kind of interaction.
For public data interaction (like downloading your public photos (photostream) from your account), there's no need to authenticate. You can get the data using only the Flickr user-id.
For other interactions (like downloading private photos (camera roll) from your account), you'll need to follow the full OAuth procedure at least once.
I was reading through the windows live developers doc here. In that I saw they are having an authentication method something like this.
GET https://oauth.live.com/authorize?client_id=CLIENT_ID&scope=SCOPES&
response_type=RESPONSE_TYPE&redirect_uri=REDIRECT_URL
I understood everything except for where do I give the username and password of the user?
I am planning to create an app(first one in my life) to learn the working.
I also have never used or coded something over REST.
When using OAuth, your application never receives the user's username or password. Rather, the user logs in to Windows Live on the Windows Live servers and authorizes your application for access to their information. After they have authorized your application, you receive an access token from Windows Live on behalf of the user. You then use that access token with the Live API to retrieve user information.
Coding something using REST protocols isn't anything too terribly complicated. It has been my experience that you're just specifying parameters to the API using GET or POST as your request method. Adding OAuth on to your requests is a matter of specifying additional parameters.
You're task is to learn two things here since you've never done REST or OAUTH before. Spend time looking at both.
Oauth is hard to get and hard to implement.
You should choose an off-the-shelf Oauth library they exists for most languages.
(Then you do not have to worry about the details. OTOH: You should know how it works to know how to set up and fix if something goes wrong.)
http://oauth.net/code/
I'm trying to get access to the Google's todo feed with this url:
https://www.google.com/calendar/tdl?secid=<SECID>&tdl={%22action_list%22%3A[{%22action_type%22%3A%22get_all%22%2C%22action_id%22%3A%221%22%2C%22list_id%22%3A%2215052708471047222911%3A0%3A0%22%2C%22get_deleted%22%3Afalse}]%2C%22client_version%22%3A-1}
If I open this in my browser with a correct secid, it shows me right what I want.
Now, the question is: how do I get secid programmatically (specifically, in a java program)? I have access to the authToken (from CalendarService), but I have no clue how to use it to authorize my access to the URL above.
I tried to use the url http://google.com/accounts/ServiceLogin, but I didn't find any examples.
Any help, please?
From what I read secid is a session ID obtained from browser's cookies. Whereas your case uses Java which implies a server app. If that is the case, you want to drop the idea of using secid entirely.
Instead, you want to check out Google's OAuth2 documentation. If you are using Java, most likely you would be interested in the web-server OAuth flow. Pay special attention to the sequence diagrams.
The key steps include:
1) Obtain an authorization code from Google OAuth with the user's consent. For that, you redirect the user to Google with the appropriate scope. Check the list of calendar scopes for your case. Once the user consents, Google redirects back to you with an authorization code.
2) Call Google OAuth with the authorization code and your app's credentials to exchange for an access token.
3) Call Google's Calendar API using the access token.
And if you use Google's Java client as suggested by #ChaosPredictor, chances are some of the steps are already wrapped into the Java client (and your code will be much simpler).
I want to display a user's wall feed and news feed on my site. How can I do this?
Is there any way to pull the feed without having to get an authorization token?
If I need a token, how do I get that?
The proper (I would go so far as to say "required by Facebook's terms and conditions") way to do this would be to get an authorization token, which involves a pop-up div asking the user if they would like to permit your site (application) to access their information.
You can customize the level of access you'd need and they would be prompted only for that. By accepting, you'd be able to access a token within their cookie. Armed with that token and your application ID and your "application secret" you can make requests to the Facebook Graph API for any data you'd like. (You use the application secret to decrypt the user's cookie, from which you obtain the access token to pass to Graph API requests.)
It's not as simple as just scraping their wall and displaying it, you'd be responsible for grabbing the individual pieces of data and organizing the display.
Edit:
In response to your comment, here is a quick tutorial for working with cookies in .NET. A Google search for "ASP .NET cookies" or "VB .NET cookies" will yield much more as well. There is an example (in PHP) here demonstrating how to decrypt the cookie. I haven't found any .NET examples, but the code here is pretty straightforward. The cookie name is "fbs_" + your application ID.
It appears to be a delimited string, so just read in the whole thing in your debugger and see what the value(s) look like. The value you want appears to be called "sig" (but, again, debug to make sure) and it looks like they're using an MD5 hash to obtain it. You can read up on what the md5() function in the PHP code is doing here and it should be easy to find a .NET analogue for that.
Once you have the access token, it's up to you how you want to get the information. I'd recommend doing it all in JavaScript just to offload the whole thing to the client's browser, not to mention that most samples you'll find online (such as in Facebook's API documentation) will be using JavaScript. But if you want to do it all server-side, Facebook's C# SDK will be of some assistance. You basically pass it the token and the Graph API path you want and it returns a JSON object with all the data.