Authentication & Authorization: OAuth

Intermediate

Approx. 2 weeks

Assumes 6hrs/wk (work at your own pace)

Join thousands of students Course Summary

As a Python programmer, leveraging Flask allows you to quickly and easily build your own web applications. But before you share your apps on the Internet you should protect your users' data, ensuring information stored on your site is safe from unwanted manipulation. You could implement web security and permissions on your own, but relying on trusted providers is a faster, safer, and easier way to allow users to login to your application - without having to create and maintain another account, profile, and password.

In this course, you will learn to implement the OAuth 2.0 framework to allow users to securely login to your web applications. You'll be provided a restaurant menu application created in Flask. By the end of this course, you will write the necessary code to implement Google+ Sign-In and Facebook Login in options so users can create restaurant menus that are viewable by everyone but only modifiable by the original creator.

Why Take This Course?

OAuth 2.0 is a popular framework that allows users to login to your web application by using third party sign ins, from providers they've already created and trust, with the click of a button. And because passwords and sensitive data are never sent, your web application does not have to deal with the complexities of secure password storage and security breaches. Your users can then control the level of access your application has to their data, and change or revoke this access at any point in time.

Prerequisites and Requirements

This course was built to expand upon the concepts introduced in Full Stack Foundations, specifically:

• performing CRUD operations
• making use of templates
• developing with the Flask framework

Additionally, HTML, JavaScript, AJAX are heavily used in this course. A basic understanding of these technologies is needed to get the most out of these lectures.

If you'd like to refresh your HTML knowledge start with our Intro to HTML and CSS course. You can check out the JavaScript Basics and Intro to AJAX courses to brush up on these topics as well.

See the Technology Requirements for using Udacity.

What Will I Learn? Projects Project: Item Catalog You will develop an application that provides a list of items within a variety of categories as well as provide a user registration and authentication system. Registered users will have the ability to post, edit and delete their own items. Syllabus Lesson 1 - Authentication vs. Authorization

Learn the difference between the concepts of authentication and authorization and address some major security concerns that developers must protect against when developing a web application. You will learn how OAuth 2.0 makes implementing security easier for developers and users alike by allowing your users to sign in to your applications while keeping all of the security on well-known and trusted OAuth providers. Finally, you will see OAuth 2.0 in action as you make API requests using Google's OAuth 2.0 Playground.

Lesson 2 - Creating a Google+ Sign-In

Learn about the different types of security flows your application can implement. You will see how security can be handled by your server, your user's browser, or both depending on the type of security your application needs. You will then add a Google+ Sign-In to an existing web application and implement a hybridized client/server flow.

Lesson 3 - Local Permission Systems

Add python code to create server-side rules that will constitute a permission system. This system will limit access of the database for each logged in user based on how the developer designs this code. You will add a User model model to your database to store the credentials, such as username, email, and profile picture, collected from the OAuth provider's API.

Lesson 4 - Adding Facebook & Other Providers

Learn to implement multiple OAuth providers on your web application. You will add Facebook Login as an alternative sign in option for your users and understand how to use OAuth provider documentation to add as many providers as you see fit for your application.