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Twitter's OAuth has a gaping security hole

shkspr.mobi

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Re: Twitter's OAuth has a gaping security hole

#4

That's a feature, not a bug. In twitter as far as I remember you have the opportunity to revoke tokens yourself. It's definitely not a security hole.

It's at the intersection of security and user experience. Changing your password because you think it's been compromised is a different use case from changing your password because you've been using it for years or forgotten it.

Re: Twitter's OAuth has a gaping security hole

#5

What approaches do other OAuth providers take to this problem? Revoking all OAuth tokens on a password change/reset takes away a good chunk of the value that many people get from using OAuth.

Agreed, but would it be difficult to have a checkbox marked "revoke all permissions to use my account from all applications" to the reset password menu?

Re: Twitter's OAuth has a gaping security hole

#9
Along the same lines, if you build a twitter app that uses Oauth and change the access from read to read/write the oauth tokens never change and won't work if you try to do a write operation. Even if you log out and log back in manually. More problematic the error is '401 - Unauthorized', blah.

The work around recommended by Twitter? Register a new twitter app that is read/write from the get go. :(

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