Using the App Console, I am generating an Access Token for use by my java application.
Why is my access token expiring? It worked yesterday but today I get the below error.
How do I get a permanent token for my application to use? (Usage is similar to a "Google Service Account" that generates a permanent token.)
Exception:
InvalidAccessTokenException
{
"error_summary": "expired_access_token/...",
"error": {
".tag": "expired_access_token"
}
}
UPDATE 2022 12 02:
Thanks for the below information and links. After about 5 hours of working on wrapping my brain around the concepts and the example code, I finally got something working by doing the following:
(1) Using the example code and manual process at https://github.com/dropbox/dropbox-sdk-java/blob/main/examples/examples/src/main/java/com/dropbox/core/examples/authorize/ShortLiveTokenAuthorize.java I obtained an auth code.
(2) I then wrote java code to post the auth code to the https://api.dropbox.com/oauth2/token end point and receive tokens including the refresh token.
(3) I then wrote code to post the refresh token to the same end point to receive an access token.
It appears I can hold on to the refresh token and repeat step 3 to get access tokens each time.
HOWEVER, I must be missing something here.
This is WAY too much extra work that should be done either by the App Console and/or the SDK.
Also, it seems to me that a “Client Credentials Flow” should be available in the API and SDK.
Your thoughts?
Dropbox is in the process of switching to only issuing short-lived access tokens (and optional refresh tokens) instead of long-lived access tokens. You can find more information on this migration here.
Apps can still get long-term access by requesting "offline" access though, in which case the app receives a "refresh token" that can be used to retrieve new short-lived access tokens as needed, without further manual user intervention. You can find more information in the OAuth Guide and authorization documentation.
The official Dropbox Java SDK can actually handle the process for you automatically, as long as you supply the necessary credentials, e.g., as shown retrieved in the examples here.
I am playing around with IBM Cloud Functions (OpenWhisk) and trying to setup authentication through OAuth with Facebook as the provider. I have setup an app with Facebook, I am able to successfully connect with this and fetch my token and I am able to verify this by fetching basic profile information (name and userID).
My problems starts when I enable OAuth in the IBM Cloud Functions API. I get a HTTP code 500 back from the call with very little information about what actually went wrong.
{"code":500, "message":"Oops. Something went wrong. Check your URI and try again."}
The only thing that is stated in the dashboard is:
You can control access to your API through the OAuth 2.0 standard. First require an end user to log in via IBM Cloud App ID, Facebook, GitHub, or Google. Then include the corresponding OAuth token in the Authorization header of each API request. The authenticity of the token will be validated with the specified token provider. If the token is invalid, the request will be rejected and response code 401 will be returned.
With this information I got that I need pass the token with the Authorization header. My best guess is that the call fails somewhere when the token is being validated.
I am using Vue and Vue-axios to perform the API call. My current call looks like this:
this.$http.get(API_URL+"?user_id="+localStorage.user_id,{headers :{'authorization':localStorage.token}}).then((response) => {
console.log(response);
});
I have tried adding bearer/Bearer or token/Token in front of the token (some posts I read indicated that you should do this), but this had no impact on the response.
If I disable the OAuth authentication from the Cloud Functions side, the code above works and correctly retrieves the data (with or without the header option).
From the Chrome Dev tools it looks to me like the token is added correctly to the request, since the request headers have the Authorization header with the token.
I am not that familiar with OAuth or IBM Cloud Functions, so the problem might have a very easy fix. However, I am unable to find documentation which clearly shows me how I am supposed set this up. I am also unable to find any logs or more information about what actually fails here. Am I missing something obvious here?
Kjetil
I have a web app built on oAuth2 that has been in production for 5+ years. Users Authenticate and Authorize with Google and grant my application access to the Google Analytics data.
All of a sudden I am seeing a surge in failures when refreshing my users oAuth2 tokens. This is the call:
https://accounts.google.com/o/oauth2/token
Passing these parameters:
client_id=xxyyzz
client_secret=xxyyzz
grant_type=refresh_token
refresh_token=xxyyzz
This seems to be be on accounts that are less active (i.e. it could be 15+ days between instances where we make calls on their behalf). I have to reach out to them and have them "ReAuthorize" against Google to get things working.
1) Did something recently change with Google oAuth2 or the GA Core Reporting API?
2) If access tokens are not refreshed after some time period will my refresh token become invalid? i.e. should I make calls against all accounts even thought I don't need the data; just to keep the refresh token from going stale?
Thanks,
Mark.
Update on Scope
It was requested to provide the scopes in play here:
https://www.googleapis.com/auth/userinfo.email https://www.googleapis.com/auth/userinfo.profile
https://www.googleapis.com/auth/analytics.readonly
11/17/2016 Update:
We did find an issue that resulted in some tokens being purged. We are working on to make sure it doesn't happen again. Unfortunately there is no way to restore the tokens that were deleted and your users will have to reauthorize again.
11/11/2016 update:
We are actively investigating the issue. You should ask your users to re-authorize the application.
(from Google Identity/Auth team) We would like to investigate this a bit more to make sure our system is working as intended. Other than the token revocation (with certain scopes) on password change, we haven't changed the token revocation policy.
Would you please ping me via my G+ profile?
We would like to implement "Sign-in with LinkedIn" in our app. Since the app has JS fronted and RESt-based backend, we decided to exchange JSAPI tokens for REST API OAuth tokens as described here.
If a user successfully signs in, the frontend sends credentials cookie with client-side bearer token and member ID to the backend. On the backend we check if a user with such a member ID already exists and if not, we exchange JSAPI token for REST API OAuth token, retrieve user details from LinkedIn a store it in our database.
Now the question is if we can use that cookie to authenticate each user's request to our REST backend. After a user successfully signed in via JSAPI, the cookie should be automatically passed to our backend on all subsequent requests so we can check member ID. Are there any drawbacks that we missed? Or is this idea as a whole wrong?
Should we rather authenticate a user only once by means of the cookie and then issue our own authentication token and send it back to the client?
The way cookies work in general is they are passed on every request to the domain they belong to. LinkedIn is setting a credentials cookie to your domain.
As long as you are validating those credentials on every request it's perfectly acceptable to use their tokens as authentication.
Personally I don't find that to be a great idea and would prefer to validate their credentials once and create my own auth token to use from there on out. You can always set that token to expire at some-point and re-validate the LinkedIn credentials (which will still be getting sent on every request anyway). This limits the amount of times you're checking with LinkedIn and should increase the responsiveness of your app.
Either way could work.
If you are using the LinkedIn cookie to validate a user by member id, you should validate the cookie's signature on each request per section 2 of the doc you linked and question 2 of the FAQ.
Using your own token could make it easier to implement an account which belongs to your app and is not necessarily connected to LinkedIn, assuming there's the potential to either connect solely with some other service(s) or no 3rd part(y/ies). Still should validate any time you trust the member id in the cookie though.
The doc provides a validation example in PHP, and if you're interested in improving a ruby version, I have a shameless plug.
The flow that you've outlined in your latest comment of going straight for the OAuth tokens is the best way to go if you were only signing in to convert the JSAPI tokens to OAuth tokens and then not using the JSAPI further. If you were planning to actually use both the JSAPI tokens within your front-end app and the OAuth tokens on your back-end, then it's better to take the conversion route.
Why do you need both a "code" and a "token" in the Facebook OAuth2 authentication flow as described here: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/authentication/ ?
If you look at the OAuth dialog reference (https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/dialogs/oauth/), it seems like you only ever use the token to fetch information about the user, and if you specify the response_type parameter as token or code,token, then you get the token on the first time.
Why do you need to get a "code" and then use the code to get a "token" as opposed to getting the token directly?
I guess I'm misunderstanding something basic about how OAuth works, but it seems you avoid the request to https://graph.facebook.com/oauth/access_token entirely if you get the token the first time with the dialog.
Let us take a simple example to differentiate authentication code vs access token.
You as a user want to try a new Facebook app called Highjack.
So you click on the application and the Highjack app asks you to log into your Facebook account. When you are done, Facebook generates an authentication code for you.
This code is then passed to the Highjack server which uses its own FB client id, FB secret and your authentication code to get an access token.
In the above example the authentication code is confirming you as a user is a valid FB user. But the second steps says "you as a FB user is giving access to the Highjack app for certain resources".
If the Highjack app wanted implicit grant (i.e direct access token), then the access token would be visible to you also since it is being exchanged with the browser. This means you can now call all Facebook APIs on behalf of Highjack using the access token. (You can only use the access token to get your personal information but Facebook has no way of knowing who is calling their APIs.)
Since we have 2 parties (You and Highjack) authenticating with Facebook we have this 2 fold mechanism.
Borrowed shamelessly from Salesforce Documentation:
Authorization Code
An authorization code is a short-lived token representing the user's access grant, created by the authorization server and passed to the client application via the browser. The client application sends the authorization code to the authorization server to obtain an access token and, optionally, a refresh token.
Access Token
The access token is used by the client to make authenticated requests on behalf of the end user. It has a longer lifetime than the authorization code, typically on the order of minutes or hours. When the access token expires, attempts to use it will fail, and a new access token must be obtained via a refresh token.
From the OAuth 2.0 Spec:
The authorization code provides a few important security benefits
such as the ability to authenticate the client, and the transmission
of the access token directly to the client without passing it through
the resource owner's user-agent, potentially exposing it to others,
including the resource owner.
So, basically - the main reason is to limit the # of actors getting the access token.
"token" response is intended primarily for clients that live in the browser (e.g.: JavaScript client).
Answer) You need/want both the code and token for extra security.
According to Nate Barbettini we want the extra step of exchanging the authentication code for the access token, because the authentication code can be used in the front channel (less secure), and the access token can be used in the back channel (more secure).
Thus, the security benefit is that the access token isn't exposed to the browser, and thus cannot be intercepted/grabbed from a browser. We trust the web server more, which communicates via back channels. The access token, which is secret, can then remain on the web server, and not be exposed to the browser (i.e. front channels).
For more information, watch this fantastic video:
OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect (in plain English)
https://youtu.be/996OiexHze0?t=26m30s (Start 26 mins)
If you look at the flow of Authorization Code OAuth type, yes, there are actuary two steps:
<user_session_id, client_id> => authorization_code
<client_id, redirect_uri, authorization_code, client_secret> => access_token, refresh_token
In step1: the user tells the OAuth Server that "I want to auth this client (client_id) to access my resource. Here is my authentication (user_session_id or what else)"
In step2: the client (client_id) tells the OAuth server that "I've got the user the authorization (authorization_code), please give me an access token for later access. And this is my authentication (client_id & client_secret)"
You see, if we omit step 2, then there is no guarantee for client authentication. Any client can invoke step1 with a different client_id and get an access token for that client_id instead of its own. That's why we need step2.
If you really want to combine step1 and step2, you can do something like this:
<client_id, redirect_uri, client_secret> => access_token, refresh_token
We use this approach in our Open API Platform, and we haven't find any security problem yet.
BTW, there is actually an Implicit Grant type, that is:
<client_id, redirect_uri> => access_token, refresh_token
It is generally applicable to client only application which have no server backend. In that case, the OAuth server must ensure that the redirect URI belongs to that client (same with the register redirect_uri, for example).
The mix-up came because the user on behalf of himself and not the client app authenticate against the authorization server (i.e. facebook).
Its much simple to secure the client app (with https) then the user-agent (browser).
Here is the original formulation from IETF-oauth (https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-oauth-v2-threatmodel-08#section-3.4):
3.4. Authorization Code
An authorization code represents the intermediate result of a
successful end-user authorization process and is used by the client
to obtain access and refresh token. Authorization codes are sent to
the client's redirection URI instead of tokens for two purposes.
Browser-based flows expose protocol parameters to potential
attackers via URI query parameters (HTTP referrer), the browser
cache, or log file entries and could be replayed. In order to
reduce this threat, short-lived authorization codes are passed
instead of tokens and exchanged for tokens over a more secure
direct connection between client and authorization server.
It is much simpler to authenticate clients during the direct
request between client and authorization server than in the
context of the indirect authorization request. The latter would
require digital signatures.
Theoretically,
Access Tokens cannot tell us if the user has authenticated but auth code does.
Auth code should not be used to gain access to an API but access token should be.
If you have a single page application or mobile application with no or minimum backend, your application may want to access user's FB data directly at frontend. Hence the access token is provided.
In another case, you may want a user to register/login to your app using some external auth service provider like Facebook, Google etc. In this case, your frontend will send the auth code to the backend that can be used to get access token from Facebook at serverside. Now your server becomes enabled to access user's FB data from the server.
Basically, as an extension of Lix's answer, the access code route allows a Resource Owner (i.e. the Facebook User) to revoke authorization for their User Agent (i.e. their browser), e.g. by logging off, without revoking authorization for an offline Client (i.e. Your Application).
If this is not important, then there is no need to use the access code route.
Furthermore, the access code is provided to ensure that the Token provided to a server is actually registered to the Resource Owner (i.e. the Facebook User), and not the User Agent (or a Man-in-the-Middle).
This seems similar to the question of either choosing the implicit vs authorization code grant flow. In fact, here is what looks like an opposite view point?!.
Also, as Drew mentioned,
When the access token expires, attempts to use it will fail, and a new access token must be obtained via a refresh token.
another piece is the refresh token, but I don't see that being explained too well in the FB Docs. If I'm correct, the implicit grant (the direct token) should be really short lived, but that is to-be-enforced and FB.js seems to hide a lot of that (this one I have not looked as deep into).
If I'm correct, the code%20token is an optimization allowing both the User Agent to have a token and allowing for the server to initiate the token exchange process in a single request (as anything over Network IO is considered expensive, especially to a User Agent).
In OAuth 2.0 with facebook, the overall concept is simple as follows.
Step 1. Obtain "Authorization Code" by a GET request
request URI: https://www.facebook.com/dialog/oauth
Params:
response_type=code
client_id={add your "App id" got by registering app}
redirect_uri={add redirect uri defined at the registration of app}
scope={add the scope needed in your app}
Headers: None
Step 2. Obtain the "Access Token" by sending the authorization code as a POST request
URI: https://graph.facebook.com/oauth/access_token
Params:
grant_type=authorization_code
client_id=<add your "App id" got by registering app>
redirect_uri=<add redirect uri defined at the registration of app>
code=<obtained authorization code from previous step>
Headers:
Authorization:Basic encode <App Id:App Secret> with base64
Content-Type:application/json
Step 3. Use the access token got from above step and retrieve user resources
It’s because the access token is given to an AUTHENTICATED client (third-party app) using a shared secret that only FB and the client knows. The only way that the user could directly request the access token is by knowing the shared secret, which would make the secret public and could lead to a man-in-the-middle attack. Further, while FB can guarantee a secure connection to the user, FB can’t guarantee the handoff of the token to the client is secure. However, FB (and OAuth2) does require a secure connection between the client and FB. The access token is tied to the client public ID (usually hashed), which means only the original client application can use it to request the token because the secret is sent along with the authorization code to get the access token.
You recieve a token when the user logs in. But you might want to change the token when you are performing other actions. EG posting as your app/page or posting as a user with offline_access.