As you can see on the image, spotify has a modified version of facebook login.
On the spotify app shown, user can login using either facebook or spotify account.
I wonder if its only on the looks or they were using other facebook authentication process.
I also wonder and worried if spotify could get facebook password entered by the user.
What facebook authentication they were using in here?
As you have noticed, Spotify is using a different Facebook login flow that is not listed anywhere in the official Facebook developer documentation. Since the Facebook password is entered into a closed source client, there is no way for you to know for sure what happens without heavy reverse engineering and debugging of the client. In that sense you should be worried. It goes against and devalues the good policy of "Please don't enter your password anywhere else". Thinking about differently, Facebook trusts this company enough to allow this. There might be a few more companies that have the ability to use this login flow, but I don't know.
I work at Spotify and was there when it was introduced (September 2011). We worked very closely with Facebook (I helped build some parts of the backend integration). It is not my favorite part of the client though. I would much prefer a standard Facebook OAuth 2 authorization flow. That was however one of the main technical problems in spring 2011 when we started to build this. We basically needed to embed a browser in the client to make it work properly or redirect the user to a browser and then back to the client again. There were also other reasons that I can't remember why we didn't do this.
Now when we have an embedded browser (since December 2011) it would be much easier to change. I believe this type of login flow will be phased out eventually.
Related
I have an packaged app in the Chrome Web Store that I'd like to transition from a paid app to a free one with in app purchases. I need to be able to detect if the current user had paid for the app previously.
To be able to use the licensing API, I need the current user's OpenID URL. I was able to get this to work using chrome.identity and a popup dialog that the user has to authorize. But it is a bad experience and kind of a scary dialog.
For hosted apps, it's possible to get the user's OpenID URL without any user interaction or authorization. (see How to skip the OpenID approval screen). It would be fantastic if somebody knows how to make this work without user interaction for packaged apps.
I've detailed some of the approaches I've tried on this chromium-apps thread. I suspect it may be possible to do this with chrome.identity.launchWebAuthFlow but I wasn't able to discover the exact incantation of parameters to google's oauth/openid endpoints to make this happen silently.
I think you need to refer to this Link1 Parameters
this parameters are different techniques using that you can do this task..
also To bypass the Login/approval screen refer this link2
Here in the section How to skip the OpenID approval screen the details are explained which you can use..
And In case of packaged app this should ask for permanent permission that will help in OAuth throughout the life of app..
Client Library JavaScript Based
Authentication using Library
After your comment I thought this you can bind in your app.!!
Let me know what works for you..
I noticed that the Windows desktop Spotify application asks me for my facebook username and password in the login screen. I am wondering what happens behind the scenes.
When I change my fb password in my browser I have to use the new password in the Spotify desktop app login screen. There are even situations when the Spotify desktop application shows me a fb popup where I have to grant permissions for Spotify itself.
I know that Spotify uses an embedded Chromium browser engine to do all the heavy lifting. But isn't it against Facebooks TOS to do it that way?
I mean, does Spotify posts my username and password to the facebook login.php and intercepts the result page to get my cookie? Is there a documented way to handle a login to facebook on behalf of the user in a proper way?
No, they are using an old and deprecated REST API method called auth.login:
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/rest/auth.login/
Obviously I can't stop you using this in your own app, but given how old that API is and how fully REST API is now deprecated, it'd be a bad idea to rely upon it.
Instead, for Windows desktop apps, I believe Microsoft offers a Facebook C# SDK which will contain ideal methods for authentication. I'm more familiar with their newer methods that are offered for Metro Apps called Web Authentication Broker.
These pretty much just load a web frame inside the app, get the user to login to Facebook, then show the Permission Dialog (if required). From there, the app can store the UID of the user and presumably a long-lived access_token that they received upon auth. This way, they only need to ask the user to login again once every 60 days.
There are other device-based authentication methods offered by Facebook, but most are still in private testing, the only one that is currently recommend for desktop apps is stated on this page under the heading Windows, OS X and Linux native apps (at the bottom of the page).
Update December 2013: Because the Facebook Login docs have changed significantly since I wrote this answer, I'd like to point out a couple of new additions:
Manually Building a Login Flow details the steps that desktop apps can take to login users. What is new here is that Windows 8 apps can now use their deep-linking ID in the redirect_uri of the Login dialog, meaning it'll multitask back to their app from a Login Dialog when completed or cancelled. This is an improvement from the previous WebView setup, because a User's default browser will likely have them logged into Facebook already.
Login for Windows Phone is the special guide for Windows Phone 8 apps to use.
I have an app that can be accessed on mobile phones, both iOS and Android. The app has a social component to it, so people are sending data to and from my server.
I also have an interface for this app that will be accessible through Facebook.
When logging into the app via mobile device, using the native app for that device, one can just log in with standard username and password.
However, obviously if a user accesses the app in Facebook, they will expect to already be logged in since they are already logged into Facebook.
So I need to make it so that my app can take a log in from Facebook, pretty much automatically (?) for users who are coming at it from within Facebook.
Further, it's possible (dare I say "likely"?) a user might access the interface from both Facebook and one of the mobile versions of the app. In which case I need to be able to ensure that the username/password authentication they use on the device points to the same account associated with their Facebook login.
So... all that said... what kind of Facebook authentication should I be studying and implementing.? I'm looking at their documentation right now, and like all documentation, it's not easy to grasp. There is server-side (authentication code flow?) and client-side (implicit flow?), and authentication tokens, and I'm already a bit lost.
Also, I assume Facebook's approach is to want to take over my login in process completely, not live side by side with my mobile-device-only login, but I'd like to make sure users have the option of not using Facebook authentication if they don't want.
Can someone point me in the right direction for how to do this? Basically let me know which part of the documentation I should be focusing on.
And are there any gotchas I should watch out for?
Your server will receive a signed request when your app on facebook.com is loaded; from this you can find the FB uid of the user.
If you obtain the FB uid for users of your mobile device clients you'll be able to match your app's accounts between mobile device & facebook.com clients.
The bottom of the main authentication docs page gives links to further documentation for different client types. The main mobile authentication page has side-bar links to tutorials & SDKs for iOS & Android. Alternatively you could use the server-side OAuth flow as your devices have browsers that support this.
Once you've completed authentication on the mobile device it's simple to obtain the uid.
You can also use the Facebook authentication flow instead of your own username/password authentication.
I have seen many web apps supporting Facebook Connect...
But when i login through those apps sometimes the authentication is successful but nothing is returned to the app and the login page just goes to a blank page in that new windows and stops... The whole process fails... And this has not occurred once but many times...
So my question is:
Is Facebook Connect a good solution to use in apps or should i use something like Google Login or Twitter Login or OpenID or just a simple password based login or all of the things and let users choose what they want?
And if your answer is app the solutions then wont my database become messy and the app slower because it has look for more data now?
I know it depends on various factors but I just want your opinion, what would u choose and why?
Supporting Facebook connect as login function make sense only if your app has something to deal with Facebook (which is the most of our app today ;-)).
The behave of some app when sucessfully Authenticated and then Authorized is up to these app.
FB login give you all the tools to build you own user experience.
The things become a bit more difficult when you want to introduce FBConnect within already existing login base, while you have to find a way to bind the Identified FB user with your user account.
For a middleware system with internet (which works inside a set-top box) I want to develop a primitive Facebook interface where users can type their user-names and password, showing their latest notification, messages and other casual stuff on the TV screen by using the recent Facebook Graph API.
This middleware program uses Java ME to run programs (such as this simple facebook app) and it can connect to internet however it doesn't have a real web browser. Without browser it can connect to any url to retrieve the JSON response however I am not sure how to achieve authentication without a real browser.
Under this circumstances, is it possible Facebook authentication? If you think so, what approach would you suggest ?
Thanks
Facebook provides trusted partners with a private Authorization API to get an OAuth 2 token from a username / password.
A more complicated approach would be doing something similar to how Netflix enrolls a device:
device calls server to obtain a Code
device shows code on screen and directs user to go to URL on server and enter Code
server redirects user to Facebook and obtains OAuth token, user told to go back to device
device calls server with Code and obtains OAuth token
device can now make calls directly on behalf of user
According to this documentation on "Desktop Application Authentication" I don't believe your desired result is possible:
Facebook's OAuth implementation does not include explicit desktop application support. However, if your desktop application can embed a Web browser, you can add Facebook support to your application easily using the same OAuth User-Agent Flow used by JavaScript clients.
However, it is clearly possible for certain vendors to do this, since Microsoft's Xbox 360 Facebook application does exactly what you are proposing. I'd be interested to see if anyone has dug up any API for doing this that Facebook doesn't want in their most obvious documentation.
This isn't an answer but I'm trying to do the same thing. Check out this guy's blog which uses another server to proxy the requests:
cory wiles blog
If you figure it out please post a detailed answer here so I can do it to.. :)
I think it is possible though it is pretty complicated and subject to sudden changes of Facebook interface. It might break the agreement between you and Facebook.
What you do is to emulate the Facebook.
One path you have to set up a Facebook application. Once you got the authorisation from user, you can to something with Graph API.
You need to the Facebook log-in process and authorisation process. There are some capturing tools on http/https request and response. Analyse them, both header and body.
Once you know the authorisation mechanism, you can replace it with you own. Everything afterward is on Graph API.
Another path is to emulate Facebook login and message and notification process. Capturing and analysis is needed.
In the past I have used a tool called screen-scraper (full disclosure: I used to work there) to automate logging in to facebook. Basically, it imitates a browser session; it allows you to set session variables (i.e. username, password) which would then be submitted to facebook, just as if the user had submitted them in a browser.
You may not be able to use screen-scraper in your set-top box environment (although it is java-based, so it's possible it would work). Even if it doesn't, you could implement a similar strategy in java, making the HTTP calls a browser would make to load the login page and submit the user's credentials. To keep the user's info safe make sure whatever HTTP client library you use supports HTTPS.
Proxy tools and extensions like Charles, Fiddler2, Firebug, Chrome's dev tools, etc. are helpful in seeing exactly what the browser is sending to the server in requests.