In my last blog, I talked about OpenID which solves the problem of one having to remember userid and password for multiple websites. Today I will talk about another problem related to passwords.
In today’s world, a lot of our personal information is scattered across multiple websites and many a times you would like all this information to be consolidated at one place e.g. your financial information may be scattered across the websites of multiple banks. We also have lots of social networking sites today and here also we typically use different sites to share different types of information. E.g. instagram to share photos, tripit to share travel plans. Generally what you share in one social networking site is available to others in the same network but most likely you would like this to be available to users of other sites as well. E.g. you would like your instagram photos or your tweets are available to your facebook friends as well.
Now a day’s most of the popular websites provide services and APIs. Websites and applications can use these services and APIs to access and display user’s information from multiple different websites.
If a website or an application needs to pull the user’s data from multiple websites then it would need to store user credentials (userid/password) for all such websites and use them to pull information on the user’s behalf. The Problem with this approach is that not many user’s would be comfortable in sharing their credentials and rightly so.
OAuth is an open protocol that allows websites and applications to securely expose and consume services and APIs. It solves the problem of how one website can access user’s data/information from another website without knowing the user’s credentials.
In my next blog I will get deeper into how OAuth works.
In today’s world, a lot of our personal information is scattered across multiple websites and many a times you would like all this information to be consolidated at one place e.g. your financial information may be scattered across the websites of multiple banks. We also have lots of social networking sites today and here also we typically use different sites to share different types of information. E.g. instagram to share photos, tripit to share travel plans. Generally what you share in one social networking site is available to others in the same network but most likely you would like this to be available to users of other sites as well. E.g. you would like your instagram photos or your tweets are available to your facebook friends as well.
Now a day’s most of the popular websites provide services and APIs. Websites and applications can use these services and APIs to access and display user’s information from multiple different websites.
If a website or an application needs to pull the user’s data from multiple websites then it would need to store user credentials (userid/password) for all such websites and use them to pull information on the user’s behalf. The Problem with this approach is that not many user’s would be comfortable in sharing their credentials and rightly so.
OAuth is an open protocol that allows websites and applications to securely expose and consume services and APIs. It solves the problem of how one website can access user’s data/information from another website without knowing the user’s credentials.
In my next blog I will get deeper into how OAuth works.
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