What is OAuth2?

OAuth 2.0 is the industry-standard protocol for authorization. OAuth 2.0 focuses on client developer simplicity while providing specific authorization flows for applications.

OAuth Roles

OAuth defines four roles:

• Resource Owner: The resource owner is the user who authorizes an application to access their account. The application’s access to the user’s account is limited to the scope of the authorization granted (e.g. read or write access)

• Client: The client is the application that wants to access the user’s account. Before it may do so, it must be authorized by the user, and the authorization must be validated by the API.

• Resource Server: The resource server hosts the protected user accounts.

• Authorization Server: The authorization server verifies the identity of the user then issues access tokens to the application.

Implementation at Matrica

We have implemented some OAuth 2.1 specifications (see this link) to have a more secured flow:

• PKCE is required for all OAuth clients using the authorization code flow

• Redirect URIs must be compared using exact string matching

• The Implicit grant (response_type=token) is omitted from this specification

• The Resource Owner Password Credentials grant is omitted from this specification

• Bearer token usage omits the use of bearer tokens in the query string of URIs

We will implement the newest standard once it comes out of draft.