Into the symmetry

Well well well, hacking time again :) No much time for big explanation but few weeks ago I was using a little variant of Lassie come home to potentially steal a valid Facebook's access token. In a nutshell reading a blog post of how the great Egor Homakov did hack Github  ( see Bug 1. Bypass of redirect_uri validation with /../ ) I though how about Facebook :) ?. Well here is what I found, I have copied a part of my report to Facebook security : The redirect_uri in the https://graph.facebook.com/oauth/authorize is not validated correctly. I can bypass the redirect_uri validation with /.\.\../. This might result on stealing the authorization code of a Facebook registered OAuth Client. As an example I would use Parse.com (that is owned by Facebook). In https://parse.com/account there is the chance to link an account with Facebook. Now the correct request is: https://www.facebook.com/dialog/oauth?response_type=code&client_id=506576959379594&redirect_uri=https%3A%2...

Leaving apart some FUDs I think that RFC 6749 (aka The OAuth 2.0 Authorization Framework) has proven to be a really great  "tool" so far. One of the limitation of this spec though is that the 2 main flows Authorization Code Grant and Implicit Grant work reasonably well if there is some sort of human interaction and the user agent is available. What if one or both of these requirement are missing? One easy alternative would be to use the Resource Owner Password Credentials Grant flow. This would require the OAuth client to know the Resource Owner password. That is exactly why OAuth has been designed namely to avoid such situation. Another, more tempting, alternative would be to use a refresh token (that never expires). The best choice though IMHO is to use "tools" from another specification from the becoming-big OAuth specification family :) The specification I am referring to is  the JSON Web Token (JWT) Profile for OAuth 2.0 Client Authentication and A...