OAuth: an open standard for authentication
Summary
Description of the OAuth standard.
OAuth
OAuth is an open standard for authorization initiated in November 2006 by Blaine Cook at Twitter and subsequently developed by a group of implementers including people from openID, and Google. OAuth allows users to share their private resources (e.g. photos, videos, contact lists) stored on one site with another site without having to hand out their credentials, typically supplying username and password tokens instead. 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.