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Betelbuddyyesterday at 1:47 PM4 repliesview on HN

This is the only thing you need to know about OAuth. As FYI ...Eran Hammer is the author of OAuth 1.0 and original editor of the OAuth 2.0 spec.

[1] "...Eran Hammer resigned from his role of lead author for the OAuth 2.0 project, withdrew from the IETF working group, and removed his name from the specification in July 2012. Hammer cited a conflict between web and enterprise cultures as his reason for leaving, noting that IETF is a community that is "all about enterprise use cases" and "not capable of simple". "What is now offered is a blueprint for an authorization protocol", he noted, "that is the enterprise way", providing a "whole new frontier to sell consulting services and integration solutions". In comparing OAuth 2.0 with OAuth 1.0, Hammer points out that it has become "more complex, less interoperable, less useful, more incomplete, and most importantly, less secure". He explains how architectural changes for 2.0 unbound tokens from clients, removed all signatures and cryptography at a protocol level and added expiring tokens (because tokens could not be revoked) while complicating the processing of authorization. Numerous items were left unspecified or unlimited in the specification because "as has been the nature of this working group, no issue is too small to get stuck on or leave open for each implementation to decide."

David Recordon later also removed his name from the specifications for unspecified reasons. Dick Hardt took over the editor role, and the framework was published in October 2012.

David Harris, author of the email client Pegasus Mail, has criticised OAuth 2.0 as "an absolute dog's breakfast", requiring developers to write custom modules specific to each service (Gmail, Microsoft Mail services, etc.), and to register specifically with them."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OAuth


Replies

pwdisswordfishsyesterday at 3:58 PM

> IETF is a community that is "all about enterprise use cases" and "not capable of simple". "What is now offered is a blueprint for an authorization protocol", he noted, "that is the enterprise way", providing a "whole new frontier to sell consulting services and integration solutions".

At the end of a talk about Oauth 2.0 at some indie or fediverse conference during lockdown, Aaron Parecki, who was then and still is employed at Okta, was asked if it might not be worth isolating the parts of the protocol/flow that actually requires a service (i.e. protocol-aware server in the loop) from those that don't, so that you could still get limited authentication/identity-tagging if your "provider" is your personal domain where you're just hosting static site. He immediately acted like he was addressing the dumbest person in the virtual room (it was a remote conference), telegraphing through his response that he might actually be on the verge of physical pain having to deal with such an imbecilic question.

tptacekyesterday at 7:26 PM

Meanwhile, in cryptography engineering circles, I recall the general sentiment as being "at least they stripped all the weird attempted cryptography out of it, so it's just same-origin/TLS security now".

afioriyesterday at 8:11 PM

Imo the need to register an app with an oauth provider is a plus

browningstreetyesterday at 3:46 PM

I love Google’s list of 10 different ways to verify my login. OAth is the best. MFA forever!