Security News > 2022 > April > OAuth 2.0: What is it and how does it work?
OAuth 2.0: What is it and how does it work? What on Earth is OAuth 2.0?
OAuth 2.0, or just OAuth for brevity, is what, for example, allows you to post something on your blog and then have it automatically announced on Instagram, Twitter or any other social network, but without ever passing to your blog content management system the passwords for any of those accounts.
Many services even include some kind of centralized OAuth dashboard, to let users keep track of how many Clients they authorized, see which permissions each of them has, and update or revoke them at will.
OAuth 2 defines three main ways to issue such "Grants." The one most commonly used by social networks and similar online services is called "Authorization Code," while "Client credentials" are optimized for machine-to-machine scenarios, in which software programs must get authorizations from other programs, not human users.
This highly scalable architecture, plus the granularity of permissions provided by OAuth Scopes, are what makes OAuth 2.0 so useful and so successful.
Also See Share: OAuth 2.0: What is it and how does it work?