What is OAuth? How the open authorization framework works

Admission tickets in an digital network / access / admittance / authorization / authentication WildPixel / Your Photo / Getty Images Since the beginning of distributed personal computer networks, one of the toughest computer security nuts to crack has been to provide a seamless, single sign-on (SSO) access experience among multiple computers, each of which require unrelated logon accounts to access their services and content. Although still not fully realized across the entire internet, myriad, completely unrelated websites can now be accessed using a single physical sign-on. You can use your password, phone, digital certificate, biometric identity, two-factor authentication (2FA) or multi-factor authentication (MFA) SSO solution to log onto one place, and not have to put in another access credential all day to access a bunch of others. We have OAuth to thank for much of it.

• OAuth definition OAuth is an open-standard authorization protocol or framework that describes how unrelated servers and services can safely allow authenticated access to their assets without actually sharing the initial, related, single logon credential. In authentication parlance, this is known as secure, third-party, user-agent, delegated authorization.

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• OAuth history Created and strongly supported from the start by Twitter, Google and other companies, OAuth was released as an open standard in 2010 as RFC 5849, and quickly became widely adopted. Over the next two years, it underwent substantial revision, and version 2.0 of OAuth, was released in 2012 as RFC 6749. Even though version 2.0 was widely criticized for multiple reasons covered below, it gained even more popularity. Today, you can add Amazon, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Netflix, Paypal and a list of other internet who’s-whos as adopters.