What is OAuth (Open Authorization)?
With the advancements in the digital world and our reliance on all of the online systems, it has become very important for everyone to make their accounts and applications secure. Using passwords to sign in is a great thing but it brings some difficulties. Consider yourself having to enter individual passwords for different accounts after some time.
Well, it is not convenient at all. Single Sign-On provides amazing features and benefits instead where you only have to authenticate for once and the computer security system authorizes you for everywhere you need to be. SSO or Single Sign-On uses different methods and protocols for its working and the one that we are going to discuss here is OAuth.
What is Oauth?
OAuth is one of the best protocols or frameworks available for SSO. It describes how different servers and services that are not related at all can allow authentication that leads towards safe access. All of this is done using OAuth without the need of sharing anything or any credentials for authentication between those servers and systems.
OAuth is considered to be a very secure as well as a delegated option that also allows different user agents and third-party service integrations for expanding the horizon of its functionalities.
How does it work?
OAuth works using HTTPS and it can only work in this way. There is no other way of working. So, consider that a user is signed in to a website and needs to access some other service on some other website that needs authentication as well.
Here is the way things go in the form of a flow with OAuth.
- - Both the website connects using OAuth on the behalf of the user to provide the user’s identity
- - The second website generates a one-time token for the transaction
- - The first website passes this token and secret unique to the client software at the user end
- - The software at the client’s end passes these to the authorization provider of the system
- - The client is asked to provide authentication
- - User authenticates using a transaction
- - The system gives user a token that is passed to the first website and then to the second website
- - The transaction that the user wanted to make has been completed
In this way, OAuth authentication makes things very simple and easy for users like several other authentication protocols. As everything is done using tokens and one-time secrets for authentication and authorizations, there is no need to manually enter passwords for different websites and services whenever you need to access or use them.
While it seems to be pretty simple and easy from the front end, it is not that simple from the backend because things need to be secure by all means considering that there are millions of users using the OAuth protocol. Anyhow, OAuth protocol makes things very easy because the user does not have to deal with the authentication process manually at every website.
Pros and Cons of OAuth
While there are benefits of everything, there are some demerits as well because nothing can be perfect especially in the case of software and services where there is continuous improvement going on. So, below are some of the pros and cons of OAuth:
Pros:
- - OAuth is very flexible
- - OAuth is very lightweight to work on older systems
- - It is scalable
- - OAuth is widely accepted because of its simplicity
- - It works on the runtime making things extremely secure
Cons:
- - User cannot freely control his data
- - It is not user-driven
- - Secure implementation lacks here.
Is OAuth Safe?
While OAuth brings some amazing functionalities, there are still chances that a user gets a phishing attack and compromises his credentials. It is because of the lack of inheriting security binding in the OAuth system. If the users stay concerned about their security and enter their passwords by checking all the links then it can be pretty secure otherwise there are chances for facing hacking attacks.
Final Verdict
Everyone these days is present on the digital works and uses the sign-in by passwords. While it may be good on a small scale but when you have to work on different websites and services throughout the day, signing in can take a lot of your productivity. In conclusion, what you need to do instead is use SSO with the help of OAuth.
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