Into the symmetry

Lately I have been more and more involved with OAuth (at work and in my spare time with Apache Amber ) so before I forget some lessons learned I decided to put them here. First reminder to self:  OAuth is NOT an authentication protocol. It is an access delegation protocol. I hope this is clear to all the OAuth developers/implementators. Should you use OAuth for authenticate in your application/website you'd better be careful (specially if you use the client side flow aka implicit grant). If you wonder why give a look here and here . Risk: "access_token phishing" attack Mitigation : Use Open ID Connect or API like https://graph.facebook.com/app?access_token=YOUR_TOKEN To be continued... P.S. little off topic Apache Amber is now linked also from http://oauth.net/2/

Short story   Apache Amber 0.22-incubating released! http://markmail.org/message/2ywodi74vlv4d2qe See also: http://incubator.apache.org/amber/download.html and http://oauth.net/2/ Little more Despite the earthquake that hit "OAuth 2 world" the Amber team is proud to announce the first release of Apache Amber ( Apache Amber 0.22-incubating ).  The people that followed the project since the beginning know that has been a kind long journey due some legal issue that slowed down the release.  I am really keen to see Amber used and improved in the near future. I can see at the horizon some Open Id Connect and UMA integration and obviously to be fully compliant with the last version of the spec (version 31?). From the other hand I am kind of sad to see the lead editor leaving the specification. Specially the first post is definitely an interesting rant to read with a lot of valid points and considering who is the author cannot be ignored. I think only time will t

Some time ago I was looking for a Java OAuth library in order to help me to develop an OAuth aware server application. The natural place where to look for those information was the OAuth website that lists about 4 different Java libraries. The only one I am familiar with is Scribe . Indeed it is a really light, well documented and universally used library to build OAuth clients. It also contains out of the box integration for many well known websites that use OAuth (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, and many more). Unlikely though Scribe did/does not have any support for OAuth server side (that was my original problem). After a while a colleague of mine point me out an Apache project called Apache Amber and it turned out it was what I needed :) (Still wonder why Apache Amber is not listed in the OAuth website though). So the lesson learned is that if you are looking for a simple way to build your OAuth server do not hesitate to use Apache Amber. Here you can see how easy is to build the

According to http://developers.facebook.com/docs/authentication/ in order to programmatically log the user out of Facebook from an OAuth 2 client (single sign-off) is enough to redirect the user to https://www.facebook.com/logout.php?     next=YOUR_REDIRECT_URL    &access_token=USER_ACCESS_TOKEN This would require a valid access token and a valid redirect url. Alternatively this can be achieved client side by calling FB.logout() . In practice though there is a third (obviously not documented) unofficial way to achieve the same. It is the case indeed that the standard log out form of Facebook suffer from CSRF. Indeed while posting to http://www. facebook .com/ logout .php the related form uses a field,  fb_dtsg , that is supposed to be an anti-CSRF token, however it is not verified properly/at all. Removing this field still resulted in successful logout ! According to Facebook (I have been in touch with them about this) this is not a security issue though (primarily

It means nothing to a lot of people. It does means a lot to me! My first commit to an Apache project: http://svn.apache.org/viewvc?view=revision&revision=1236276