I assume workflow for OAuth is very similar in various sites. (twitter, linkedin)
I can successfully get requestToken, accessToken.
Is it okay, if I just store Accesstoken and use it later???
Yes, this is the generally accepted practice. I use this workflow on a few sites and based on the posts on the LinkedIn Developer's site, it looks like the method that most people are using.
The only trick is to cover yourself in the case that the user rejects your application's access rights; filter all responses from the LinkedIn API looking for an error indicating that the access token is no longer valid (you should be doing this filtering anyways for throttling issues).
Related
Probably a long shot, but after authenticating a user via OAuth and retrieving some user info from the provider, is there a way to prove to a third party that this user is authenticated and that this piece of information retrieved with the token (an email address, for example) is indeed the data supplied by that provider? Without sharing the access token, of course.
Primarily interested in Google and Facebook here, if that makes a difference.
The general, standard way is to use OAuth2 Introspection.
Not everyone supports this (I don't know of any of your 3 providers do). Potentially a good fallback could be to just do a request and see if it succeeds.
I can't access this particular Twitter API endpoint:
https://api.twitter.com/1.1/collections/show.json?id=576828964162965504
(with any ID I tried). The request returns an error with the message "Your credentials do not allow access to this resource" and code "220".
The App-only authentication Bearer Token I'm using for the request is exactly the same as for my requests to /search/tweets.json, /statuses/user_timeline/show.json, /statuses/show.json and /users/show.json, all of which work just fine. Also the collection is public, so App-only authentication should suffice, I'm thinking.
I'm somehow sure that I'm missing something here, but can't find it anywhere in the official API docs, nor on StackOverflow, nor on Google.
According to the Twitter API documentation, collections/show requires a user context - so app-only authentication will not work in this case.
Additionally, collection IDs are usually in the form "custom-756140390927872000" or similar. You can get the list of collection IDs from a user by hitting the collections/list?screen_name=handle query.
This is an API related question that applies to the APIs that I'm working on and would like to know the standard way of doing this.
say a user1 has created accounts so he can access it by
GET /accounts
but when he accesses transactions for a particular account
GET /accounts/acct1/transactions
how would this API know that the acct1 actually belongs to that user1 and is not the case where user2 is accessing user1's accounts.
This api is accessed via a Mobile app using Oauth 2.0 tokens. So while the access token control the access to API endpoints, how do we control access to only specific user's data at that endpoint. (using scopes?)
I've been looking at Spotify's apis and they seem to be doing this via v1/me end point.. Still reading...
I'm a noob at this and it looks to me that this should be documented somewhere in a standard manner in some RFC, but I couldn't find it and would appreciate direction
Can you provide more details on your use case? Why are you using OAuth?
It sounds like you need an authentication protocol - i.e. a protocol to let your server know who is accessing a particular API.
To quote the OAuth website:
OAuth 2.0 is not an authentication protocol
OAuth's main use-case is letting one application perform operations on behalf of a user of another application.
As an example, if your server wants to post a message on Facebook on behalf of a user, you will use OAuth to obtain a token from Facebook which lets you post messages on behalf of the user. Note that, in the most general case, your application does not know which user is represented by the token. Indeed, the user may not even be a (registered) user of your application - they only have to be a user of Facebook.
Practically speaking, you often can use the token you have to query Facebook for the identity of the user. So your server would extract the OAuth token from the request headers and use it to issue a query to Facebook's Graph API to obtain the user ID.
Note that the user is a Facebook user rather than a user of your app, so you will need to somehow map the Facebook user ID to your own users and permission system - i.e. check your database to ensure that the user has permissions to do what they asked to do.
This is the mechanism that is typically used when using OAuth like an authentication protocol (which, as quoted above, it is not).
I should add that if your app obtains an OAuth token and passes it to your server for the purposes of authentication, then this flow is not 100% secure, as discussed for example here, so make sure you do proper risk analysis for your case. In a nutshell, a determined attacker can theoretically impersonate your app and obtain tokens representing other users.
Call me a newbie, call me dumb, rate down this topic. Do as you like, I'm just here to ask a question and hopefully learn something from it.
So I've been making an API for my website today (well attempting to) and I've noticed this "thing" on most popular sites API's such as Twitter, Foursquare, Tumblr called "OAuth". From my research today I have gathered that it's basically a way of giving the consumer a token to access restricted data from the provider depending on what the user chose without the user handing over their password and username.
But why do I have to use OAuth, why can't I just give out an API to the consumer key and they just use that? I will then see if the user has allowed access for the application, and they will have to grant access for the app to take information from their account, such as photos.
Something that also confused me is why the Tumblr API uses both. It seams on reading blog details they use a simple api key but posting on blogs you need an OAuth Signature.
OAuth is a protocol and has a set of specification defined by some expert group to define how to share data.
Basically what you are seeing is just a part of the OAuth mechanism,and there is a lot of communication and hand shaking mechanism to ensure the security of user data as well avoiding unauthorized access to data.
OAuth mechanism exits at 2 levels
three-legged authentication
Two-legged authentication
Both have their positives and negatives and there are a set of procedure which needs to be taken care for security and data integrity.
Allowing access only based on access_token/consumer key is really a very weak security mechanism and can easily be hacked by any one who happens to get access to your consumer key while OAuth system make sure by sharing a time bound access_token.
For details refer to this thread oauth-2-0-benefits-and-use-cases-why
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.