OAuth allows users to hand out tokens instead of credentials to their data hosted by a given service provider. Each token grants access to a specific site (e.g. a video editing site) for specific resources (e.g. just videos from a specific album) and for a defined duration (e.g. the next 2 hours). This allows a user to grant a third party site access to their information stored with another service provider, without sharing their access permissions or the full extent of their data.
OAuth is a service that is complementary to, but distinct from, OpenID.
The OAuth discussion group was created in April 2007, for the small group of implementers to write the draft proposal for an open protocol. DeWitt Clinton from Google learned of the OAuth project, and expressed his interest in supporting the effort. In July 2007 the team drafted an initial specification. Eran Hammer-Lahav joined and coordinated the many OAuth contributions, creating a more formal specification. On October 3, 2007, the OAuth Core 1.0 final draft was released.
At the 73rd Internet Engineering Task Force meeting in Minneapolis in November of 2008, an OAuth BOF was held to discuss bringing the protocol into the IETF for further standardization work. The event was well attended and there was wide support for formally chartering an OAuth working group within the IETF.
The OAuth 1.0 Protocol was published as RFC 5849, an informational Request for Comments, in April 2010.
Since August 31, 2010, all third party Twitter applications have been required to use OAuth.
Facebook's new Graph API only supports OAuth 2.0 and is the largest implementation of the emerging standard. As of 2011, both Google and Microsoft had added OAuth 2.0 experimental support to its APIs.
It has been suggested that design decisions to make OAuth 2 easier to program may have serious long term security implications, if the version under consideration in late September 2010 is adopted.
Category:Cloud standards Category:Internet protocols Category:2007 introductions Category:Computer access control
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