OAuth Will Murder Your Children

#1

Post by holman » Tue, Jan 25, 2011, 6:42 PM UTC

OAuth Will Murder Your Children
zachholman.com

Re: OAuth Will Murder Your Children

#2

Post by gnok » Tue, Jan 25, 2011, 6:52 PM UTC

This is a crucial step for safeguarding privacy/security if OAuth is to become more prevalent.

Any app may request any number of permissions from me; but I as a user should be able to choose what permissions it gets. I would take this one step further and allow the user to retroactively withdraw permissions (OAuth already allows for asking the user for additional permissions).

Re: OAuth Will Murder Your Children

#3

Post by EGreg » Tue, Jan 25, 2011, 6:54 PM UTC

The problem with twitter in particular is that it lets you do two things: read and post messages. What granular options do you see?

Re: OAuth Will Murder Your Children

#4

Post by bryanlarsen » Tue, Jan 25, 2011, 6:55 PM UTC

Android needs this too, perhaps even more than OAuth does.

Re: OAuth Will Murder Your Children

#5

Post by gnok » Tue, Jan 25, 2011, 6:58 PM UTC

EGreg wrote: post #3

The problem with twitter in particular is that it lets you do two things: read and post messages. What granular options do you see?

His post wasn't Twitter specific; he just used Twitter as an example.

But since you asked, here's a couple I can think of: * A rate limit on the number of Tweets per hour/day/week * Ability to follow or unfollow * Ability to index my tweets if they're private

Re: OAuth Will Murder Your Children

#6

Post by judofyr » Tue, Jan 25, 2011, 7:05 PM UTC

Even better: Let the application also say why it needs the permission:

    * Read access
        We want to analyse your tweets
    * Read/write
        Because we want to spam your friends

Re: OAuth Will Murder Your Children

#7

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Jan 25, 2011, 7:08 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: OAuth Will Murder Your Children

#8

Post by albertsun » Tue, Jan 25, 2011, 7:08 PM UTC

I recently discovered that to use the @Anywhere javascript API you have to have your app request read and write access even if you don't want write access.

* http://dev.twitter.com/anywhere/apps/new

Re: OAuth Will Murder Your Children

#9

Post by mjuhl24 » Tue, Jan 25, 2011, 7:09 PM UTC

EGreg wrote: post #3

The problem with twitter in particular is that it lets you do two things: read and post messages. What granular options do you see?

You can do a lot more than that with twitter:

1. Read Tweets 2. Write Tweets 3. Read direct messages 4. Write direct messages 5. Follow someone 6. Unfollow someone 7. Create a list 8. Add to a list 9. Remove from list 10. Delete List 11. Edit profile information/avatar ..etc...

Re: OAuth Will Murder Your Children

#10

Post by tptacek » Tue, Jan 25, 2011, 7:13 PM UTC

Meh. The problem with this is that every empirical study of actual users is going to demonstrate that they simply don't care. The primary control that OAuth dialogs like these express is "prevent malicious phishing apps from coercing users into inadvertantly opting in", and the dialog we have now is sufficient to that purpose.

For the tiny subset of users (I am one of them) to whom this issue matters, you can mitigate the problem by periodically culling your OAuth tokens through the Twitter interface.